The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the failure of the state to withstand emergencies, threatening the lives of millions of citizens. By introducing regimes of social and economic lockdowns in fighting coronavirus, the state faced a societal crisis. Its consequences can't be overestimated, especially due to economic recovery. The growing distrust of households in the state was caused by the disruption of their usual way of living, the growth of unemployment, and the deterioration in their well-being. So people began to distinguish significant differences between their individual values and preferences institutionalized by the state. Hence, the priority for the state should be to restore citizens' confidence by creating a more inclusive societal environment, minimizing the negative consequences of the societal crisis. Infrastructure PPP projects can demonstrate the social preferences' public priority. The “institutional matrix” of PPP organizational forms makes it possible to choose conditions for public projects' implementation with the absolute priority of the healthcare system.
TopIntroduction
The rapid spread of COVID-19, deadly dangerous for human life, served as stability test for the existing social foundations of society, as well as for the depth of mutual trust between people and society, citizens and the state. The originality of the crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the actions of states that failed to quickly identify the “zero” patient and introduced lockdown regimes that destroyed the structural integrity of national societies and the economics. The severity of such a test, which fell on the shoulders of individuals as their well-being and established way of living was destroyed, turned into an overestimation of the role of state and society in ensuring the stability of households. The most striking demonstration of such individual reassessments was the compliance or non-compliance by citizens with self-isolation regimes, since they became a function of the degree of their trust in the actions of their state and of individual desire to follow the extraordinary norms of behavior imposed in society in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the coronavirus exposed the main “spring” of modern societies, which was unable to dampen the consequences of an unexpected infection, dangerous to human life, and contributed to the development of a societal crisis as a demonstration of national societies’ structural disunity. It is in this context the Boston Consulting Group’ experts (Boston Consulting Group Perspectives. (2020)) have treated the COVID-19 outbreak as the first and foremost a societal crisis.
Experts' estimates have shown that a social and economic lockdown aimed at halting the exponential growth of coronavirus cases in countries around the world has caused unprecedented losses in both human life and national welfare. At the same time, COVID-19 proved the priority of social problems, which, moreover, were aggravated by the absolute drop in the volume of material production in the world. The pandemic dictated the uncontested subordination of the functions of the state: first, to stabilize the epidemiological situation in the country and only then not to waste time for timely re-opening economics after lockdown. The experts of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have designated this newest dualism in government actions as “epinomics” (Gjaja, et al. (2020)). The epinomic policy emphasizes the paramount importance of ensuring the health and life of citizens, the achievement of which is an unconditional factor in the ability to successfully revive the economy. Moreover, the specificity of the first problem is related to the fact that, together with the physical health of citizens in the context of levelling the epidemiological situation in the country, perhaps the most important thing for states becomes to eliminate the negative consequences of the societal crisis. In the latter case, it is about the mechanisms of socialization of individuals in the structure of society (see the chapter in this book titled “Rebuilding a Stronger Business in the Uncertain Post-COVID-19 Future: Factor of Intellectually Autonomous and Adequately Socialized Employees”).
As for reducing the scale of uncertainty of the post-coronavirus reality, it is largely associated with creating the more inclusive societal environment, which is predetermined by a change in the functions of the state in the socio-economic system. Moreover, this issue has both a theoretical background and many application problems, since in the past there were no “best practices” of state behavior in situations similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. From the viewpoint of the strategic goals of the social communities’ progress in the post-coronavirus future, the most important becomes the restoration of their societal integrity as an objective condition for the rapid economic reopening after the lockdown and for the adequate acceptable scenario of the events in a case of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Actually, the following conclusion of World Health Organisation (WHO) Strategy Update of 14 April 2020 testifies to this: “Governments must also repurpose and engage all available public, community and private sector capacity to rapidly scale up the public health system.” It is about restoring the sphere of intersection of the values of society as the integrity of citizens and public choice aggregated by the state.