The global crisis that engulfs the world is in many ways unprecedented. It combines multiple economic, social and political challenges and is inherently interconnected. It is compounded by a variety of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, falling commodity prices, increasing energy and food prices, growing debt, slowing global growth, and ongoing conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. These developments threaten to deepen the global recession and exacerbate pressures for protectionism. Moreover, the impact on emerging economies is particularly severe and is revealing and exacerbating preexisting weaknesses in their economies. A solution requires domestic policies tailored to the specific circumstances of each country that are designed to revive growth, restore confidence and ensure an orderly return to financial stability. This must be complemented by appropriate actions at the international level.
The causal attributions that individuals make about the cause of a global crisis are often driven by perceptions of its controllability. In the case of a locally confined crisis, individuals tend to perceive that national institutions are both responsible (in terms of descriptive legitimacy) and able to address the problem. However, because global crises are events with deterritorialized reach and a non-locally specified origin, they require regulatory efforts that go beyond the borders of one nation. This demands coordination that is difficult to achieve through the traditional hierarchical model of the nation-state and calls for institutions with a high degree of trustworthiness (Tomlinson and Mayer 2009).
Consequently, perceptions about the causes of global crises have a profound influence on consumers’ attitudes toward international institutional trust. These perceptions in turn shape the effectiveness of interventions aimed at maximizing well-being under global crisis conditions.