The Response of International and Regional Financial Institutions to COVID 19

April 6, 2022

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

  • Authors
    February 3, 2022
    COVID-19 has ravaged nearly every country in the world, with the globalization of recent decades intensifying its spread. As of mid-2021, the world had spent $16.5 trillion—18% of global GDP—to fight the disease. And that amount does not even include the most important losses such as deaths, mental health effects, restrictions on human freedom, and other nonmonetary suffering. Nearly 90% of this spending was by developed economies, with the rest by emerging market and developing eco ...
  • Authors
    January 26, 2022
    COVID-19 has caused serious damage throughout the entire world. As of mid-2021, the global fiscal cost of COVID-19—excluding the most important consequences, such as human lives, mental health effects, restrictions of human freedom, and other non-pecuniary components, have amounted to at least $16.5 trillion, about 18% of world GDP (Dinh 2021). Financial support has varied across countries depending on income level, political willingness, and the extent of the pandemic in each econo ...
  • Authors
    December 29, 2021
    Après une longue période de prix atones, le café a vu ses cours se raffermir au cours de l’année 2020 et du premier trimestre 2021, avant de flamber durant l’été et l’automne. Il renouait alors avec des plus hauts niveaux depuis 2011, date de la fin du dernier « super-cycle des matières premières (2002-2011). Tandis que la demande progresse structurellement, l’offre s’est repliée, pénalisée par une conjonction de facteurs climatiques, géopolitiques et, bien évidemment, sanitaires en ...
  • Authors
    Gerson Javier Pérez Valbuena
    Diana Ricciulli
    Jaime Bonet
    Inácio Araújo
    Fernando Perobelli
    December 28, 2021
    This paper analyses the regional economic differences in the impact of lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 ordered by Colombia’s national gov­ernment. Using an input-output model, we estimate regional economic losses by extracting a group of formal and informal workers from different sectors of the economy. Results show regional differences in the impact of lockdown measures on their labour markets, local economies, and productive sectors. We also find that periphera ...
  • December 15, 2021
    Since its emergence, the new coronavirus has continued to bring many uncertainties, whether in terms of health aspects, policy measures or social and economic consequences. If there is, however, one certainty in this Covid-19 era, it is that the pandemic is a turning point in human hist...
  • Authors
    December 6, 2021
    Between January 2020 and June 2021, the world spent about US $16.5 trillion (18% of world GDP) to fight COVID-19, and this amount does not even include the most important losses such as deaths, mental health effects, restrictions on human freedom, and other nonmonetary suffering. Nearly 90% of this amount was spent by developed economies; the rest by emerging market and developing economies. Low-income countries spent just US $12.5 billion, or less than 0.0001% of the total. Moreove ...
  • December 1, 2021
    La pandémie a déclenché une crise de développement sans précédent, qui a remis en cause la résilience de nos systèmes économiques, politiques et sociaux. Mais, dans l’effort de confronter ses implications multiples, il y a aussi une opportunité de s’élargir vers de nouveaux horizons en ...
  • December 1, 2021
    La pandémie a déclenché une crise de développement sans précédent, qui a remis en cause la résilience de nos systèmes économiques, politiques et sociaux. Mais, dans l’effort de confronter ses implications multiples, il y a aussi une opportunité de s’élargir vers de nouveaux horizons en ...
  • November 16, 2021
    This edition of the World Bank MENA Economic Update estimates that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s economies, which contracted by 3.8% in 2020, will grow by 2.8% in 2021. Overall, the output cost of COVID-19 so far in MENA is almost $200 billion, a number estimated by c...
  • Authors
    October 21, 2021
    In the World Economic Outlook, published October 12, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) slightly lowered its forecast for global economic growth this year to 5.9%, while maintaining a forecast of 4.9% for 2022. It also emphasized the “divergence” in the pace and extent of economic recovery in different countries. Two factors are highlighted in explaining the divergence. First, there are the different paces and extent of vaccination in different countries, that is, the ‘Great Vac ...