Travel has been badly hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent restrictions on cross-border movement across the world. There has been a decline of 42-47 per cent in the world’s total passengers in 2021 compared to 2019. For India, while the number of passengers travelling by air picked up after the first wave, it fell drastically when the second wave hit. For June 2021, the average daily departures were at 1,100, higher than 700 in June 2020, but still significantly lower than 2,000 in April 2021.
Travel becomes an important medium for trade in services, especially where consumers or firms make use of a service in another country. It is, therefore, necessary to revive travel and to provide conducive and safe conditions for it.
The introduction of Covid-19 vaccines has opened up opportunities to help revive travel. However, it is important to carefully design policies that help revive travel demand. In a recent guideline, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended its member states do not seek proof of Covid-19 vaccination or recovery as a mandatory condition for entry to or exit from a country. As per the agency, vaccinated people can be exempted from testing and quarantine requirements. In this direction, many countries like China and Israel have introduced vaccine certificates that ease the process of entering and travelling across the destination country for vaccinated travellers.
Though these certificates can be looked at from the lens of trade facilitation, they can potentially act as a trade barrier if they encourage discriminatory treatment. The recent and the most contentious issue in this regard is the European Union’s “Green Pass” scheme. Through this vaccine certificate, the European Commission intends to remove travel restrictions such as entry bans, quarantine obligations and testing. The EU has listed only four vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for the pass: Pfizer-BioNTech’s…