Beyond 2020: How the world might recover and rebuild, according to experts

This might be a foolish prediction, but I will hazard a guess that we are going to see a Brexit deal... It seems there's been a breakthrough [on regulation]... Once you’re down to how much cod and hake you can catch, there’s a deal to be done and you can’t flounder.

In handling the crisis, bits of the welfare state functioned in ways we've not seen before... Europeans feel they have moved towards a fiscal apparatus capable of moving trillions of euros. And they have been able to maintain focus on the Green Deal... while another team is negotiating Brexit... If you’re looking for sophisticated, affluent democracies juggling a lot of balls simultaneously... It's slow, but it’s the sort of politics we need going forward.

The pandemic is catalyzing a lot of the challenges we were already worried about before COVID-19... We are going to head towards a much more progressive environment, in which government becomes a bigger arbiter of capital and labour, much more tax dependent and aggressive, much more regulation. I fear we'll see a shrinkage in the private sector, more delistings from the stock market, and more deglobalization. It's a pretty bleak picture.

I'm a little bit more optimistic... [In Western economies], the vaccine is there. There's a huge amount of stimulus. I don't think the permanent damage is anything like from the global financial crisis... Aligned with a Biden administration, that's going to be more expansionary, the ingredients are there for a pretty impressive 2021... But the division between those countries who have been vaccinated and those who have not is going to become starker.

I don’t see a 'V-shaped' recovery for American foreign policy. The world the Democrats are returning to in 2021 is not the one they left in 2016. A lot of the facts on the ground have changed... It will take a year for the Biden administration to rebuild the institutions of foreign policy... The best thing Biden can do is recalibrate, so the goals of the US can match its resources. It will look for stability and predictability in American foreign policy, it will back away from war.

I want to be optimistic and constructive, I wouldn’t count the US out, but it’s going to be a steep hill to turn this situation around.

The carbon-neutral goal shows China wants to be a global player. I think climate change is the area, despite their differences, where China and the US can come together. Biden has made clear the first thing he will do is to rejoin the Paris accord. China is more than willing to continue to be a global player in climate change, it will be happy to work with the US in that regard.

If one reads President Xi’s promise not just as a statement to the outside world, but as the opening gambit in an extremely complex battle inside China’s political economy about re-orientating the Chinese growth machine away from fossil fuels, a sudden stop in One Belt One Road lending may actually open the door to a big rethink.