Sustainable development goal deficits and the Covid 19 pandemic

In publications spanning the last 20 years, the present author has discussed the ranking of entire nations by their social and economic performance. Here the sustainable development goals (SDGs) achievements of all OECD member nations for 2020 are investigated, using a set of nine indicators of “Human Well-being” published by the OECD office in Paris, and also using Covid-19 data published by the World Health Organization (WHO). We show that the pandemic struck more severely those nations that already before Jan.1, 2020 harbored unrecognized and unattended well-being deficits in terms of indicators such as care fo the elderly, personal safety, and hygiene. The calculations support views argued forcefully by J.E. Stiglitz, J.- P. Fitoussi and M. Durand (2019): markets are not in equilibrium all the time, and economics needs a new paradigm recognizing the possibility of Pareto inefficiency.