Recovery from the pandemic in the MENA region will witness different bases, with a negative growth expected for oil exporters driven by COVID-19 and the current oil production and supply scene, said Gita Gopinath, economic counsellor and director of the research department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
This was an answer to Ahram Online’s question on the IMF’s projections for the MENA region’s economic growth in 2021 and 2022 during the press conference the IMF held on Tuesday to release its world economic update report.
She added that the slowdown in vaccine distribution in the region also contributes to the sluggish economic growth that the region is likely to experience in 2021.
During the conference, Gopinath revealed that rapid vaccine distribution is expected to add about $9 trillion to the global GDP in the period from 2020 to 2025, $4 trillion of which are projected to be added to developing countries’ GDP.
Dealing with the ongoing crisis, in light of the new IMF’s updated figures, Gopinath stressed that countries across the world need to expand in digitalisation in order to boost production, adopt green economy policies, transform to new climate economies, apply easy financial conditions, and insure financial stability.
She also added that they need to set medium-term fiscal frameworks to meet the financial pressure caused by the pandemic.
The global economy is projected to grow to reach 5.5 percent in 2021 and 4.2 percent in 2022 following an estimated 3.5 percent contraction in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the IMF’s updated report on the world economic outlook.
The estimate for 2020 is 0.9 percent higher than projected in the IMF’s October forecasts, which reflects the stronger than-expected recovery on average across regions in the second half of 2021, according to the report.
In emerging markets and developing economies, inflation is projected at just over 4 percent, which is lower than the historical average of the group, according to the report.
