The Commercial Determinants of Three Contemporary National Crises

The Commercial Determinants of Three Contemporary National Crises: How Corporate Practices Intersect With the COVID-19 Pandemic, Economic Downturn, and Racial Inequity

The United States finds itself in the middle of an unprecedented combination of crises: a global pandemic, economic crisis, and unprecedented civic responses to structural racism.
While public sector responses to these crises have faced much justified criticism, the commercial determinants of these crises have not been sufficiently examined.
In this commentary the authors examine the nature of the contributions of such actors to the conditions that underpin these crises in the United States through their market and nonmarket activities.
On the basis of this analysis, the authors make the following recommendations on the role of governance and civil society in relation to such commercial actors in a post-COVID-19 world.
- First, our efforts to build a healthier and stronger United States must be directed at the upstream drivers of inequity from both government policy and the private sector.
- Second, there must be a renewed focus on developing sound processes of public sector decision-making and governance.
- Third, there is a role for civil society in general and academia in particular to find constructive ways to hold policymakers and the commercial sector to account through greater accountability, monitoring, and evaluation.