For the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 90 million people go into poverty due to the pandemic.
The overall losses for world production due to the coronavirus amount to 22 trillion dollars in the period 2020-2025. This was stated by the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund Gita Gopinath, underlining that the global economic contraction of 2020, albeit lower than expected (-3.5% instead of the -4.4% previously forecast) remains the worst since the Great Recession. “150 countries in 2021 will have per capita incomes below the levels of 2019” added Gopinath, estimating that in 2020-2021 about 90 million people will slide into extreme poverty. “It is necessary to act quickly for broad access to vaccines and medicines” against Covid to “correct the profound inequalities that exist at the moment” said the economist, underlining how the new variants of the virus “remind us how the pandemic is not over. until it ended up everywhere “.
However the world economy is traveling faster than expected and global GDP is expected to grow this year by 5.5%, 0.3 percentage points more than previous estimates. China and India will record increases of 8.1% and 11.5% respectively; Philippines by 6.6% (e 6,5% nel 2022).
For 2022, the Fund confirms a general growth of 4.2%. The recovery, however, warns the Fund, is “incomplete” with the economic activity that “remains well below pre-pandemic levels” and subject to strong “uncertainty”. More specifically, the United States should grow by 5.1% this year with a significant upward revision compared to the forecasts of last October. The euro area should instead stop at + 4.2%, or 1% less than estimated 3 months ago, Asean countries of 6%. In particular, the estimates for 2021 for Germany, France, Spain and Italy have been lowered. According to the new numbers, Germany should score + 3.5%, France + 5.5%, Spain + 5.9%. The growth estimate for Italy is 3%.
Meanwhile, the richest thousand (1000) in the world have recovered their losses from Covid in 9 months, while the billions of poor will do it in 10 years: the Oxfam report.
The recession is over for the super-rich. The 10 richest men in the world have seen their wealth increase by $ 540 billion since the start of the pandemic: this is a sum that would be more than enough to pay for the vaccine for all the inhabitants of the planet and to ensure that no one falls in poverty due to the virus. Just think that between March and December 2020, as the pandemic triggered the worst employment crisis of the last 90 years, leaving hundreds of millions of people unemployed or underemployed, Jeff Bezos‘ net worth rose by $ 78.2 billion. From march 2020 how much the wealth of the filipino billionaires, like Razon, Gokongwei, Zobel de Ayala, Tan and others, has increased?.