CGD Policy Blogs

As more governments grapple with the immense difficulty of bringing their country to a halt, leaders from low- and middle-income countries are increasingly skeptical of mimicking policies that may have worked elsewhere because of radical differences in demography, health system capacity, and cultural context.

While the world’s decision makers are now rightly focusing on the COVID-19 crisis and its potentially devastating economic aftermath, the climate change agenda has been moved from the center stage. As the world begins to rethink what the post COVID-19 economic order will look like, climate change will again play a key role. And so will the IMF.  

Worldwide, the health worker profession relies on migrants. But policy often restricts their movement. The COVID-19 outbreak has shown that, under crisis, many of these barriers are more malleable than policymakers make them out to be.

In the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now evident that many of the public health and hospital-based interventions deployed by high-income countries may be ineffective or infeasible in low- and middle-income countries. We suggest a different order of priority for immediate next steps.