Trade, health and social reproduction in a COVID world

ABSTRACT

Building on feminist International Political Economy scholarship, my paper traces the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the trade and health nexus, taking into account the global productive economy and the realm of social reproduction. I argue that COVID-19 has exacerbated the socio-economic inequalities, including the crisis in social reproduction, that characterised the trade and health nexus prior to COVID-19. However, no ideational shift has taken place during the pandemic whereby trade policy communities conceive of trade as a tool for equitable and sustainable forms of social reproduction, as advocated by feminists, environmentalists, and others. This leaves the exploitative nature of global trade relations and their ambivalent relationship with health and social reproduction intact. I conclude that building back better from COVID-19 requires an ambitious redrawing of global trade relations and discuss a number of reforms that could be applied by global trade institutions today.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade
• health
• COVID-19
• social reproduction
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 At the time of writing no WTO data on new TIAs is available for 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) [grant number 430-2018-00349] and the SSHRC-Economic and Social Research Council Knowledge Synthesis [grant number 872-2018-0012].

Notes on contributors

Silke Trommer

Silke Trommer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester, UK.