Themes

It is with great pleasure that I welcome the opportunity to contribute insights from a Canadian perspective. This COVID-19 Special Issue on “Strengthening Health Systems in ASEAN” is timely to reflect on the challenges posed during this unrelenting global pandemic.

The creative economy has the potential to not only strengthen the expansion of global value chains, increase digital adoption among creative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), fuel the export of cultural goods and creative services, and foster ownership through local engagement, but also contribute to the overarching goal of sustainable development. The global market for creative goods increased considerably from 436 billion US dollars in 2002 to 964 billion US dollars in 2015 (UNCTAD, 2021).

Creativity is part of Singapore’s DNA and has always been intertwined with our national development. In a 2018 speech, our Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong, noted: “Singapore is a nation by design. Nothing we have today is natural or happened by itself.”

Poverty is a chronic affliction of human society, and a common challenge faced  by the whole world. China is the world’s largest developing country, with a population of 1.4 billion. In addition to its weak foundations and uneven development, the nation had long been plagued by poverty.

In the past 20 months, we have seen the impact of COVID-19 on rural communities and the policies and programmes undertaken by our governments to respond to this pandemic. Pre-pandemic, the number of job and production losses and rates of hunger, malnutrition, violence, and poverty were already alarming. The pandemic has only doubled, even tripled these figures. Unfortunately, rural communities were unprepared for these impacts and are likely to endure them longer. Let me discuss some of the now-established impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst crisis in living memory, with its impact falling  on almost, if not all, aspects of people’s lives. However, for some, especially the vulnerable, the effects feel disproportionately greater, both in terms of health and social-economic impact.