Public-private partnership in the reality of the global COVID-19 societal crisis

Abstract

COVID-19 generated a societal crisis, which manifests itself in the fact that ordinary people are forced to revise their individual values in connection with the coronavirus pandemic and state the fact of their discrepancies with the priorities of the state and with the prevailing values in society. At the same time, the destruction of societal integrity necessitates a restructuring of the relationship between the state, society, business and households, taking into account fundamental changes in the consciousness of society and in people's assessments of the quality of the state's performance of the functions imputed to it by society. Before COVID-19 the priority of functions and fiscal preferences of the state was determined in accordance with the three main groups, according to R. Musgrave. COVID-19 made serious adjustments to the priority of state obligations to society, reducing them to two: improving the epidemiological situation in the country and timely reopening economic activities. These sharp changes were expressed in the emergence of the term “epinomics”, combining the two main goals of the states’ strategies for fighting the coronavirus. Adequate forms of organizing public-private partnerships make it possible to optimize the combination of strategic goals of the state and tools for their budget funding. And this, in turn, lets it possible to advance further in resolving the global societal crisis in the post-COVID-19 pandemics future.

The State and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Missed Opportunities for Social and Economic Progress

“…The Italian economist Vito Tanzi [9] called this problem the Musgrave Triangle [10]. In this case, each corner is associated with the main functions of the state: (1) to allocate resources, (2) to redistribute income (to ensure equality in the distribution of income), and (3) to stabilize the economy (economic efficiency itself). The problem of choice or priorities in budget expenditures was related to the limitations of state revenues, which did not allow the state to finance all groups of functions equally.…”

“…Yan Vaslavskiy 1 *, Irina Vaslavskaya 2 and Albina Bilyalova 2 1 Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University), Russia 2 Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia *Address all correspondence to: vaslavsky@yandex.ru stopping the exponential growth of coronavirus cases in countries around the world resulted in unprecedented losses to both human lives and national well-being.…”

“…The extraordinary nature of the pandemic's ordeal on national communities was also evident in the behavior of states around the world that were not familiar with best practices for responding to circumstances of force majeure. This affected the promptness with which states introduced emergency lockdown and social distancing regimes in their countries and individual regions, the strictness of their compliance, the optimal conditions for their removal, not to mention the timing of the deployment of the necessary additional health system capacities and providing them with the necessary medical personnel and technical means of combating COVID-19 [2].…”