Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
A general SDR allocation has the potential to provide rapidly additional liquidity to African economies, thereby enhancing prospects for crisis mitigation and recovery.
When the COVID-19 crisis hit, policymakers the world over found themselves grappling with urgent decisions in the face of uncertainty. The pandemic had quickly turned people’s lives and livelihoods on their heads, and the data available to guide policy response was often incomplete or outdated.
In this blog, we describe some major global efforts that examine whether essential health services have been disrupted during the pandemic, summarize what they tell us, and highlight some of the remaining gaps in our understanding and knowledge.
Twelve months ago, the world was watching as schools closed across China and millions of students began learning online from their homes. Most of us didn’t think for a moment that just a few weeks later, almost every country in the world would close their schools and the education of more than a billion children would be disrupted. Since then, millions of students have not had any school-based, face-to-face education.
Drugs created with billions in government support, bought almost exclusively by governments and international agencies are shrouded in secrecy: who is paying how much for delivery of what by when is a matter of guesswork and estimate.
As global leaders begin to put together an international financing package to help low-income countries (LICs) recover from the COVID-19 crisis, they are looking to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to be a critical financial and policy anchor for LIC’s sustainable economic recovery. We propose a five-step plan that ensures sufficient resources are available to meet a high level of demand for new loans over the next few years.
COVID-19 has hit Latin America hard on the health, economic, and social fronts. Week after week, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico are among the countries with the highest number of COVID cases, and Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru among those with the highest deaths per hundred thousand inhabitants.
The UK example has some key lessons for all countries (including the UK itself) who are considering how to improve their current response, and how to “build back better” and prepare for future pandemics.
On January 25, the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) and CGD convened a panel of seven experts, including from government, the private sector, and financing partners, to discuss the potential for increasing DRM in the aftermath of the COVID-19 health and economic crises.
In many African countries, the economic response to the crisis so far appears to have been broadly less consistent than the health response. For mitigation measures to be stronger and more effective, and for sustained recovery to take place, governments, central banks, and regional institutions will need to make tough policy choices, promote coordinated and collaborative policy implementation, and embrace bold and innovative reforms.
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