Chapter 19: COVID-19 and International Business

COVID-19 pandemic is considered one of the major challenges the world has faced. The disease can be traced back to December 2019, when the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic in March 2020, meaning that the disease was spreading worldwide. The pandemic effects were felt on all levels: individuals, businesses, countries, and supranational institutions have to deal with this new reality and the devastating impacts of COVID-19.

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted that the nineteenth century only ended in 1918, after World War I (Hobsbawm, 2010). Centuries do not finish according to the calendar. They end when great crises challenge consolidated truths. Following the same reasoning, another historian, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, now proposes that the COVID-19 pandemic marks the end of the twentieth century (Schwarcz, 2020). The great feature of the twentieth century was technology. It was the century in which the technology has gained worldwide scale, accelerated time, broke informational barriers, and reduced geographical distance. Technology was the utopia of the century (Schwarcz, 2020). The pandemic showed us their limits, putting a real end to the twentieth century in 2020.