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
    Sous la direction de
    Muhammad Ba
    Amanda Bisong
    Rafik Bouklia Hassane
    Salma Daoudi
    Pierre Jacquemot
    Leo Kemboi
    Jacob Kotcho
    Mouhamadou Ly
    Solomon Muqayi
    Meriem Oudmane
    Mohamed Ould El Abed
    Kwame Owino
    Asmita Parshotam
    Fatih Pittet
    December 29, 2020
    Dès les premiers cas du Coronavirus relevés en Afrique, les prédictions les plus sombres ont été faites sur la catastrophe sanitaire à venir sur le continent, en raison d’un certain nombre de caractéristiques supposées favoriser la propagation de l’épidémie. Ces prévisions ont été démenties par la rapidité des ripostes des Etats et par divers autres facteurs. La progression de la Covid-19 en Afrique n’est pas le fait d’une dynamique unique mais plutôt de multiples profils de risques ...
  • Authors
    Márcio Issao Nakane
    December 17, 2020
    Brazil is one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19. Apart from the dramatic health implications, COVID-19 will also scar the Brazilian economy, including through a jump in its already high public-sector debt-to-GDP ratio in 2020. Moving forward—or not—with structural reforms aimed at lifting private investment will define whether a sustainableor unsustainable—growth-cum-debt trajectory will prevail in the next decade. The extent to which Brazil regains its attractiveness for for ...
  • December 16, 2020
    The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the Moroccan economy hard, as elsewhere in the world. A collapse in external demand and a lockdown lasting more than three months have profoundly altered economic activity in Morocco, causing its first recession since 1995. The implementation of the confinement and social distancing measures was strict and came two weeks after the detection of the first cases of COVID-19 in Morocco on March 2, 2020. The lockdown was extended three times and lasted aroun ...
  • Authors
    Fernando S. Perobelli
    Inácio F. Araújo
    Karina S. S. Bugarin
    December 14, 2020
    This paper explores the use of simulations in policy decision-making in the Brazilian State of São Paulo in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose a methodology for assessing the daily economic costs of control strategies for mitigating the effects of coronavirus. The method is based on the partial hypothetical extraction approach to input–output systems. Simulated daily scenarios based on different levels of compliance to the control measures are used to help guide the design o ...
  • Authors
    December 14, 2020
    L’économie marocaine fait face à une année 2020 extrêmement difficile et complexe. La crise provoquée par le choc de la Covid-19 est singulière, multicanale et fondamentalement différente des crises précédentes. Elle altère le système productif par un double choc d’offre et de demande, amplifié, de passage, par une crise de confiance. Alors que l’année 2020 touche à sa fin, il est crucial de dresser une première évaluation circonstanciée des ramifications de cette crise, qui permett ...
  • Authors
    Hanae Bezad
    Maximo Plo Seco
    Roger Hilton
    December 10, 2020
    The Atlantic basin faces considerable challenges on multiple fronts. Financial and economic struggles, coupled with political shifts and social turmoil, are reshaping the region’s geopolitical landscape. Unemployment, poverty, violence, migration, extremism, climate change and other problems are on the rise and the need to tackle them effectively is pressing. To find adequate solutions to these challenges, it is crucial to create inclusive discussions between the North and the Sout ...
  • December 10, 2020
    The purposeful dissemination of misleading or outright false information by news media and foreign state actors constitutes an increasingly important factor in both the growing erosion of trust in national institutions and political polarization in many countries around the world. The d...
  • Authors
    September 11, 2020
    Latin American and Caribbean economies need help, but organizations like the IDB are also stretched thin. First appeared at Americas Quarterly With Latin America and the Caribbean potentially facing years of difficulties due to the pandemic and related economic crises, attention has shifted to what multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) might do to help. There’s no doubt they can play a crucial role in preventing another lost decade in the region. But ...
  • Authors
    August 10, 2020
    The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released, on August 4th, its ninth annual External Sector Report, where current account imbalances and asset-liability stocks of 30 systemically large economies are approached. This time the report went beyond looking the previous year and tried to anticipate what will be some of the impacts of the still on-going COVID-19 crisis. The report shows that the global economy entered the COVID-19 crisis with a configuration of external imbalances tha ...
  • Authors
    Jaime Bonet-Morón
    Diana Ricciulli-Marín
    Gerson Javier Pérez-Valbuena
    Luis Armando Galvis-Aponte
    Inácio F. Araújo
    Fernando S. Perobelli
    July 29, 2020
    The aim of this paper is to assess the regional economic impact of the lockdown measures ordered by the national government to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Using an input–output model, we estimate the economic loss of extracting groups of formal and informal workers from different economic sectors. Results show monthly economic losses that represent between 0.5% and 6.1% of national GDP, depending on the scenario considered. Accommodation and food services, real estate, administr ...