Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Month: June 2021

Global inequalities in science are bigger than those in the economy

Original post by Witold Kieńć

[Note from Nate Breznau] This post originally appeared in DeGruyter’s blog. I had assigned it as a reading in my course, but when I followed the link recently it did not appear and resolved instead to the home page of the blog. I searched within the blog but it did not turn up. Did DeGruyter remove it? I also am unnable to find the author of the post as his website seems to no longer exist (according to what I think is his OSF page). [update] I Tweeted to them initially and they were quick to respond.

As their blog is discontinued original blog post as recovered from the Internet Archive.

Global inequalities in science are even bigger than those in the economy. Of course, to afford food is more important than to contribute to scientific discussion. Thus results of inequalities are less dramatic in case of scientific research, however, the case of Ebola might be worth to think over here. This pathogen was detected for the first time in 1976, quite a long time ago. Would the current therapy method for the disease that it causes be the same if it had been discovered in Alaska?

The lion’s share of all scientific articles published in established academic journals comes from a small number of countries, and some of these leading countries are really small and rich, when seen from a global perspective. According to World Bank Data, there were more than 21 thousand papers indexed by the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index in 2013 that were published by Swiss researchers. This means that Switzerland was able to produce 2,603 top level papers for each one million of its inhabitants. Denmark, second in this ranking, achieved the result of 2,223 papers per million people, so 15% worse. The visualization of number of papers per million inhabitants on the global map shows the indubitable hegemony of rich, northern countries in science.

Reconstruction of original figure using the original figure thumbnail in a Google image search.

A country’s scientific publishing output per million people correlates very strongly with Gross Domestic Product per capita (Spearman 0.84!). In short, you have to be rich to have a significant input to science. This might be nothing new for you, but what is quite surprising for me, is that global inequalities in science are bigger than those in the economy.

I have calculated the Gini coefficient for 4 of the “development indicators” provided by the World Bank. First is the market capitalization of listed domestic companies, so commercial value of companies registered in a country, which I expected to be the most unequal on a global scale. The second one is Gross Domestic Product, that is a well established indicator of welfare and is known to be extremely unevenly distributed globally. I have also chosen electric power consumption, which is also a good indicator of general consumption level. The fourth indicator is the number of articles indexed by Thosmon Rueters services (this data is provided by the World Bank as well). All indicators were divided by the number of country’s inhabitants and then the Gini index was calculated.

In the result, I realized that the contribution to the scientific core is even more unequally distributed among countries than GDP and values of companies. And this is the most unevenly distributed factor that I have analysed. Countries are more equal in respect of their share in the global wealth than in their impact on global scientific discussion.

A lot of work has been done to inform citizens of Europe and North America about the dramatic scale of global inequalities. However, these inequalities are so big, that average people from wealthy countries still do not fully understand what it means “to live below the absolute poverty line”. So please, now try to imagine that inequalities in science are even bigger than that. Of course, to afford food is more important than to contribute to scientific discussion. Thus, the results of inequalities are less dramatic in the case of scientific research, however, the case of Ebola might be worth thinking about here. This pathogen was detected for the first time in 1976, so quite a long time ago. Would the current therapy method for disease that it causes be the same if it had been discovered on Alaska? The Ebola virus is the extreme and rare case, a lot of science has less to do with life or death issues.

However, my comparison to the drastically uneven world of global economy may let you imagine how different the chances of researchers from the Global South are from their colleagues in the Northern Countries. And factors that support hegemony of the North are not only economical ones. There are significant cultural and social barriers that enhance the unequal status quo (have a look here).

Public opinion, pandemic infection and policymaking: The COVID-19 story of liberty and death

This blog originally appeared in the COVID-19 Blog of the Collaborative Research Center “The Global Dynamics of Social Policy” at the University of Bremen.

The WHO declared a Global Pandemic on Jan 30th, 2020, based on overwhelming evidence that the highly infectious Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the deadly COVID-19 disease that it causes threatened all of human kind. Despite this clear message, public and government responses varied dramatically by country, city and even neighborhood. Controlling the spread of any global pandemic requires large-scale, cohesive public responses. As there is no global governance, national governments were crucial institutional actors in the pandemic fight.

In Germany, the national government was quick to push German states to adopt cohesive measures in February, and to then ratchet these up in March as infections exploded in places like New York City and Italy and localized regions and events within Germany. In Figure 1, the dotted line are the deaths from COVID-19 and the solid green line is the degree of government lockdown measures. At least in the first wave, Germany was highly successful at curbing the spread of the virus. This contrasts sharply with Sweden, displayed in the middle panel of Figure 1.

Figure 1. Daily deaths per capita and government intervention

Known deaths from COVID-19 data from Johns Hopkins and Dong, Du and Gardner (2020) taken as the deaths per day divided by the population in one-hundred-thousands. Government intervention data from Oxford University Blavatnik School of Government measured as a scale of measures from none (-1) to all possible at the highest degree (+1) (e.g., travel restriction, banned public gatherings and stay-at-home orders).

In Sweden, the constitution prevented lockdown measures in non-war-times. Although the Swedish government encouraged its residents to follow pandemic safety guidelines, the lockdown measures were relatively lax and the infection rate and resulting deaths were among the worst in the world at the outbreak of the pandemic. The Swedish response and even relatively ‘good’ German response paled in comparison to the swift and effective lockdown in South Korea and most East Asian countries). In the lowest panel of Figure 1, the deaths per capita stays nearly at zero and remained there until the time of writing this.

Government response is not the only factor as made clear in the second wave of infection starting in October of 2020. Germany and Sweden had similar death rates in the second wave with a slightly stronger government intervention and slightly less deaths in Germany. However, in South Korea government lockdown was similar to Germany, but they had fraction of the infections and almost no deaths.

Government response is simply a method to control public behaviors. Ultimately the public are the arbiters of infection, and their behaviors explain different outcomes where governments take similar control measures. In Wuhan Province, China the public had little control over their behaviors as they were confined to their homes, subject to biosecurity protocols and ‘policed’ by both actual police and Communist Party-led neighborhood watches for at least 76 days. The lockdown halted the infection and death rates locally, but the virus had already hopped China’s borders leading to the pandemic. By contrast, once arrived in countries like Sweden or the United States, the residents were mostly free to behave as they pleased. The fate of the virus spread was essentially in the public’s hands because their behaviors – movements, contacts and (lack of) awareness – provide the only way the SARS-CoV-2 virus can spread or not.

This means that especially in liberal democratic systems where the governments cannot easily impose lockdown measures, studying human behavior is essential to understanding how to fight a pandemic. Social scientists regularly observe a correlation between sentiments and behaviors. The public forms attitudes toward ‘the virus’ and ‘a pandemic’ from the news and word-of-mouth. Therefore, the contents of media messages play a major role in shaping behaviors indirectly through the information contained in news and editorial articles.

Figure 2 shows how daily infections closely follow the sentiment in media messages. When sentiment is more positive (thick yellow line) it is likely that the public perceive less risk and then engage in less precautionary behavior leading to increases in infections (dashed purple line). At the same time, sentiment is more positive as government restrictions ease (thin green line), thus enabling less precautionary behavior like social gatherings and in-person work; in turn leading to more infections.

Figure 2. Media, government intervention and infection rates in Germany and the U.S.

Sentiment analysis of all available online media sources provided by RavenPack’s Coronavirus Media Monitor, standardized with a rolling average (thick yellow line); infection rate calculated as the 18-day lead deaths from Johns Hopkins data adjusted for the demographic composition of the population (dashed line); government intervention measured Oxford University Blavatnik School of Government.

What is also striking about Figure 2 is that infection rates in Germany show a weaker correlation with media sentiment than in the United States. This is most likely due to stronger government intervention in Germany, whereby individuals have less control over their decisions, or at least will face criminal punishment for not following government guidelines. The apparent association between media sentiment and infections should be caused by public behaviors, but cross-national behavioral data are scarce during the pandemic. However, during a brief window of opportunity from March 15th to April 7th, 2020, Thiemo Fetzer and colleagues fielded a survey asking about precautionary public behaviors in at least 80 countries. Figure 3 compares behaviors with average media sentiment in the last week across these countries and demonstrates a clear correlation between more positive sentiment in media contents and less precautionary behaviors.

Figure 3. Media and public precautionary behaviors in 80 countries, March 15th – April 7th

Media Sentiment provided by RavenPack’s Coronavirus Media Monitor and precautionary behaviors calculated as a scale from the Perceptions and Behaviors at the Onset of COVID-19 survey (Fetzer et al 2020).

National governments are in a tough position during pandemics. They cannot enforce lockdown measures beyond a certain ‘breaking’ point, or the public will simply rebel or ignore them in such large numbers that enforcement becomes impossible. It is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that at least in liberal democratic regimes, the most effective pandemic prevention measures, like those taken in Wuhan, are simply not possible. The old adage ‘give me liberty or give me death’ might therefore be reframed as ‘give me liberty and death’ in pandemic times.

Data and code available at GitHub/nbreznau/covid-liberty-death