Back

The Response of International and Regional Financial Institutions to COVID 19

April 6, 2022
Related topics: 
Economy
Society
Health

The COVID-19 crisis has brought the global economy to its knees, by its intensity, scale, and far-reaching impacts. Developing and emerging economies were most hit, as they suffer from structural constrains impeding their adjustment to the new setting and lack of fiscal space to absorb even partially the shock. Furthermore, the crisis is still among us, and we are not out of the woods, yet. New variants are threatening the back-to-normal journey, inflation is looming, and public finances will be under stress longer than expected. The issue is then, how the global community can bring their support and assistance to distressed developing economies to contain a new wave of insolvency and protracted liquidity problems that threaten economic growth and poverty around the world. The G-20, the IMF, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and all the other international organizations have implemented new COVID-19-relief programs and scaled up their financial support. Allocation of Special Drawing Rights, new lending, and the Debt Service Suspension Initiative are among different initiatives adopted by the global community to help the developing countries. In this context, this webinar aims to assess the impact of the international response to COVID 19 by reviewing:

I- What has been done so far by the international community to help the developing countries cope with the crisis?

II- Do developing countries have new strategies to support and finance their economic recovery?

III- How can we accelerate the developing countries’ fair access to COVID-19 vaccines and treatment for a sound recovery?

IV- What role do international institutions have in helping to lay the ground for an inclusive and sustainable economic growth in developing countries? What are the new missions or changing roles that could be foreseen for the international and regional institutions in the light of this pandemic?

Speakers
Rym Ayadi
Founder and Scientific Director, Euro-Mediterranean Economists Association
Rym Ayadi is the Founder and President of the Euro – Mediterranean Economists Association (EMEA). She is Founder and Director of the Euro-Mediterranean and African Network for Economic Studies (EMANES). She is Senior Advisor at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS); Professor at the Bayes Business School, City University of London and Member of the Centre for Banking Research (CBR); Chair of the European Banking Authority – Banking Stakeholders Group (EBA- BSG). She is also Associated Scholar at the Centre for Relationship Banking and Economics (CERBE) at LUMSA University in Rome. ...
Hinh T. Dinh
Senior Fellow
Hinh T. Dinh is a Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South; President and CEO of Economic Growth and Transformation, LLC., Great Falls, VA, USA; and Senior Research Fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. Previously he spent over 35 years working at the World Bank Group.  He joined the Bank through its Young Professionals Program and held a variety of assignments in all three complexes: Operations, Finance, and Research.  His last position was Lead Economist in the Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.  He has authored and coauthored books published by the World Bank, Oxford University, and Policy Center for the New South, and articles in professional journals covering public finance, industrialization, and economic ...
Prakash Loungani
Senior Fellow
Prakash Loungani is Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South as well as Advisor in the IMF’s Research Department and Co-Chair of the IMF’s group on Jobs and Growth. His research focuses on Labour Markets, Macroeconomics, and Energy. He is also an adjunct Professor of Management at Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Business, where he has taught in the Executive MBA program for the past 15 years. During 2013-14, he was on the World Economic Forum’s council on employment issues. His academic work has been published in top-tier journals and the citations to this work place him among the top 5% of economists worldwide. He was the co-author of the IMF’s background paper for the ILO-IMF conference in Oslo on tackling unemployment. More recently, he is the co-author ...
Emmanuel Pinto Moreira
Senior Fellow
Dr. Emmanuel Pinto Moreira is Senior Fellow at Policy Center for the New South and the Director of the Economic Department of the African Development Bank. He is in charge of establishing a strong department as well as genuinely conducting policy dialogue with policy makers of the region while heavily focusing on new growth strategies, challenges facing middle income countries, fiscal policies and debt reduction strategies. He served previously as regional lead economist for the MENA region at the World Bank. His mission was geared towards first conducting policy dialogue with Maghreb authorities’ and helping them design their vision papers; second, he provided strategic advice on major economic challenges facing these countries, more precisely. Furthermore, Dr. Pinto Moreira ...

RELATED CONTENT

  • Challenges Africa is facing in light of Covid-19
    May 27, 2020
    Next Einstein Forum Managing Director Nathalie Munyampenda talks with Policy Center for the New South Senior Fellow Khalid Chegraoui about the challenges Africa is facing in light of Covid-19. This unprecedented health crisis is severely testing Africa's social, economic and political r...
  • Does the Brazilian policy for oil revenues distribution foster investment in human capital?
    Authors
    Otaviano Canuto
    May 21, 2020
    Our senior fellow, Otaviano Canuto, has contributed to Science Direct academic Journal, with a research paper entitled « Does the Brazilian policy for oil revenues distribution foster investment in human capital? », Volume 88, May 2020, 104760. This paper assesses the effect of oil revenues on health and education indicators (measures for human capital) in the Brazilian municipalities using exogenous oil price variations. The Oil Law of 1997, apart from to hugely increase the amoun ...
  • International Development and the Private Sector in the Coronavirus Outbreak
    Authors
    Adil El Madani
    May 20, 2020
    Despite the global magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis, the response to the pandemic has mainly occurred at national level, with very poor global coordination so far. For Africa, which will provide one in four of the world’s consumers by 2050, coming out of the crisis will cost at least $100 billion. The average ratio of public revenue to GDP in African countries is only 19%, and the debt burden already absorbs 22% of that revenue, giving many African governments limited scope compared ...
  • Une stratégie basée sur les risques pour déconfiner l'économie et tuer le virus
    Authors
    Uri Dadush
    May 18, 2020
    Alors que commence le déconfinement de l'économie française, la grande inquiétude est de savoir comment éviter une « seconde vague » de l'épidémie. Parmi les nombreuses précautions et mesures à prendre, l’augmentation du nombre de tests et le traçage systématique des contacts sont les plus souvent mis en avant par les épidémiologistes. L'idéal serait de tester fréquemment tous les habitants du pays et ses visiteurs étrangers. Pour cela, il faudrait effectuer bien au-delà de 60 milli ...
  • Download PDF
    Coronavirus: a new disaster to be expected for the oil-producing countries of the Gulf of Guinea
    Authors
    Benjamin Augé
    May 17, 2020
    The coronavirus epidemic is weakening even further the economies of the Gulf of Guinea, which have already been particularly undermined by an oil sector that has been in crisis for several years. The rapid fall in oil prices will once again put a strain on systems that fail to reinvent and diversify themselves in order to protect themselves from the shortcomings often seen in windfall economies. In addition to the economic impact, it is likely to see the potential security and polit ...
  • A Risk-Based Strategy to Reopen the American Economy and Contain the Virus
    Authors
    Uri Dadush
    May 14, 2020
    Confronted with surging unemployment and miles long lines at food banks across the United States, most states have begun reopening the economy. Many of these states are seeing rising numbers of new cases and face a real risk of relapsing into an uncontrolled pandemic. To avoid this outcome, they must adopt a strategy that entails testing, tracing, and isolation of the infected, with priority given to groups and places where the medical impact – reducing infections and saving lives – ...
  • How shaped will the post-coronavirus economic recovery be?
    Authors
    Otaviano Canuto
    May 11, 2020
    Data recently released on the first-quarter global domestic product (GDP) performance of major economies have showed how significant the impact of COVID-19 has been on economic activity and jobs, with large contractions across the board. The ongoing global recession is poised to be worse than the “great recession” after the 2008-09 global financial crisis, especially from the standpoint of emerging market and developing economies. The depth and speed of the GDP decline will rival th ...
  • Between the Virus and the Economy: the Situation of Argentina in Times of Covid-19
    Authors
    Julián Colombo
    Antonella Pelizzari
    May 4, 2020
    Last December, Covid-19 news emerged from China and, as the epicenter of the pandemic moved to Europe in February, and then to the United States in March, the news hotspots moved there too. However, there has been only a few global news streams about how South American countries, and Argentina in particular, are fighting against the pandemic. As a country with a new president, who has started this year with a preexistent economic crisis, it is worth giving a look at the current loca ...
  • Behavioral Analysis of COVID-19
    Authors
    Oumayma Bourhriba
    May 4, 2020
    In the last two decades, the world has experienced two main global crises: the financial crisis of 2008 and the current COVID-19 health crisis. A prima facie comparison reveals at least two apparent common factors: contagion effect and panic. */ - Contagion effect: in the financial crisis, the collapse of Lehman Brothers had a deep impact on foreign financial systems exposed to the U.S. subprime market. Toxic assets (non-performing subprime mortgages) spread throughout the banking ...