‘Covid chance to create new world’
Yunus interacts with Rahul, says focus must be on rural sectors
A new economic order should be built post-Covid focussing on the informal and rural sectors and the western model which calls for an urban centric financial system should be done away with, Nobel laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, Bangladeshi economist Mohammed Yunus said on Friday.
Mr Yunus, who was interacting with Rahul Gandhi as part of the former Congress president’s series on rebuilding the economy post-pandemic said: “Covid has given us a chance to reflect on how big, bold decisions can be taken. It has given us a window of thinking and we have a choice, whether we go to that terrible world which is going to destroy itself anyway or we go someplace else and build a new world where there will be no global warming, no wealth concentration, no unemployment”.
Mr Yunus, who pioneered micro-credit financing said the coronavirus pandemic has given the world a chance to reflect and take “outrageously bold” decisions to create a new order where there is no global warming, no wealth concentration and no unemployment.
He called for making a new beginning towards a system that will create space for the informal and rural economy and all sections of society.
“Financial systems are designed in wrong ways. Covid has revealed the weaknesses now. Poor people are all over but the economy does not recognise them. If we can finance them they will move up the ladder. We are engaged with the formal sector,” he said, adding that there was a need to recognise the poor, the migrants, the women at the lowest strata of society.
Criticising the western economic model, the Nobel laureate said it was based on treating the urban economy as the hub and the rural economy as the supplier of labour. “Why can’t we build an autonomous economy?”
“How did we do that in Grameen Bank? People were shocked,” the Nobel laureate said.
Poor people are all over but the economy does not recognise them. If we can finance them they will move up the ladder. We are engaged with the formal sector. — Mohammed Yunus, Nobel laureate