Notes

The actual never-ending history regarding Never Situations from the NHS.
COVID-19 is only the latest in a series of global pandemics that began when the world of disease was united by the establishment of intensive connections by sea after 1500. India was a major participant in this process. A pandemic has both direct and indirect effects. Human reactions to mass illness both mitigate and enhance these effects. The networks of transmission are paralleled by networks of private and public information. But aggregated information only becomes available as governmental information systems take shape. This article explains the use of quarantine as emerging from both. It then explains why it was introduced to India only after 1800. It then looks at three great pandemics cholera, bubonic plague and lethal influenza and governmental and societal responses to each of these. The article analyses the subsidence of pandemics into chronic presences ('background') that nonetheless contributed significantly ill-health, poverty and early death for hundreds of millions. But there is a paradox after Independence. Successful state action in independent India was nevertheless accompanied by the effective collapse of government information systems. This contributed to the massive economic damage from what should have been a minor episode of plague in 1994. The article thus reviews what we know about the effects of the pandemic, epidemic and chronic background phenomena on the economic life of Indian sub-continent through the past 500 years.As governments around the world, including the Indian government, mount a fiscal response to the Covid-19 crisis, the question of how to finance it has risen to prominence. Abemaciclib We argue that the option of the central bank monetizing the additional government debt and then writing it off offers a pragmatic way out.The paper discusses past virtuous growth cycles in India and argues that the post Covid-19 macro-financial package is an opportunity to trigger another such cycle by raising marginal propensities to spend above those to save. This is feasible since the major constraints that aborted such cycles in the past are waning. Among these constraints are commodity price shocks and other supply-side bottlenecks; financial repression and discretionary allocation; and fiscal space. While the first constraint is relieved, and there is adequate progress on the others, fiscal space is still constrained. Even so, the Covid-19 crisis necessitates a large macroeconomic stimulus. In order not to overstrain government finances it should be targeted, temporary and self-limiting. Financing features can aid this as well as improve financial stability. Large government assets can be monetized to help restructure towards more effective government spending. Specific policy implications are drawn out.We study the Covid pandemic in the Indian state of Kerala, and document the state's remarkable success in containing the pandemic's first wave. By identifying Kerala's initial conditions when it was hit by the pandemic, and different components of the state's Covid policy, we conclude While being subject to resource constraints faced by an Indian state located in a federal structure, Kerala contained its first Covid wave by preemptively formulating a comprehensive set of public actions-government actions that were supported and complemented by the state's citizens. This was achieved by leveraging and reinforcing the citizen's public trust in the state. Specifically, the state's pandemic response contained supportive measures to ensure that poor lives were not pitted against rich lives; rather, the aim was to protect all lives and livelihoods.In 2016, the monetary policy framework moved towards flexible inflation targeting and a six member Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) was constituted for setting the policy rate. With this step towards modernization of the monetary policy process, India joined the set of countries that have adopted inflation targeting as their monetary policy framework. The Consumer Price Index (CPI combined) inflation target was set by the Government of India at 4% with ± 2% tolerance band for the period from August 5, 2016 to March 31, 2021. In this backdrop, the paper reviews the evolution of monetary policy frameworks in India since the mid-1980s. It also describes the monetary policy transmission process and its limitations in terms of lags and rigidities. It highlights the importance of unconventional monetary policy measures in supplementing conventional tools especially during the easing cycle. Further, it examines the voting pattern of the MPC in India and compares this with that of various developed and emerging economies. The synchronization of cuts in the policy rate by MPCs of various countries during the global slowdown in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s is also analysed.Although freshwater invasions have not been targeted for maintenance management or eradication as often as terrestrial invasions have, attempts to do so are frequent. Failures as well as successes abound, but several methods have been improved and new approaches are on the horizon. Many freshwater fish and plant invaders have been eliminated, especially by chemical and physical methods for fishes and herbicides for plants. Efforts to maintain invasive freshwater fishes at low levels have sometimes succeeded, although continuing the effort has proven challenging. By contrast, successful maintenance management of invasive freshwater plants is uncommon, although populations of several species have been managed by biological control. Invasive crayfish populations have rarely been controlled for long. Marine invasions have proven far less tractable than those in fresh water, with a few striking eradications of species detected before they had spread widely, and no marine invasions have been substantially managed for long at low levels. The rapid development of technologies based on genetics has engendered excitement about possibly eradicating or controlling terrestrial invaders, and such technologies may also prove useful for certain aquatic invaders. Methods of particular interest, alone or in various combinations, are gene-silencing, RNA-guided gene drives, and the use of transgenes.
Homepage: https://www.selleckchem.com/products/abemaciclib.html