Damascus-Sana
He did not escape the repercussions of the continued outbreak of the Corna pandemic, that is, a global economy, including the most powerful international economies, and with the expansion of the outbreak around the world and the increasing death toll and injuries that it collects daily. Achieving an economic recovery in the short term.
Millions of people in different parts of the world lost their jobs, while requests for government aid increased in many countries in an unprecedented manner historically, especially in the United States, which witnessed in the middle of last March the largest number of applications for aid since 1982, according to the Associated Press, with many companies laying off their employees. After the outbreak of the Coronavirus, more than 3.3 million Americans submitted requests for assistance, and not only did the Americans. In France, the number of requests for unemployment benefit increased by the end of last month by 246 thousand requests in only one month.
For its part, the Congressional Budget Department painted a bleak outlook for the American economy in 2020 and expected the economy to decline in the second quarter of 2020 by 37.7 percent compared to the same period in 2019. For the whole of the current year, the administration expects the economy to contract by 6.5 percent.
The administration said that the Corona epidemic and social estrangement led to serious disruptions in economic activity which caused a wave of job losses and an end to the longest economic growth since the Second World War.
The International Labor Organization has warned that hundreds of millions of people may lose their jobs due to the aftermath of the Corona virus, and indicated in a report that the virus may lead, in the second quarter of this year, to the loss of 305 million full-time jobs.
The organization pointed out that the economic impacts of the virus affected informal workers more than others, and revealed inequalities in developed societies, while unemployment rates in the countries of the Group of Seven industrialized countries varied greatly from 30 million unemployed in the United States to 1.76 million in Japan, and the unemployment rate increased In Canada last April, from 5.2 percent to 13 percent.
According to the organization, the unemployment rate in Germany also rose last April by an average of 373,000 people, bringing the total rate to 5.8 percent. In Italy, which was the most affected by the virus in Europe, the unemployment rate reached 8.4 percent.
Economic reports and analyzes that keep pace with the global outbreak of the virus and monitor the extent of its impact on business are getting darker with the passage of days and the high number of infections and deaths due to disease and the absence of any sign of making a vaccine against it any time soon.
According to a report of the Asian Development Bank published by the British newspaper The Independent, it is possible that the global economy will suffer losses ranging from 5.8 to 8.8 trillion dollars, or between 6.4 and 9.7 percent of global GDP, and it is expected that economic losses in Asia and the Pacific will range between 1.7 trillion dollars if The disease containment process exceeds three months and $ 2.5 trillion under a long containment scenario that lasts for six months.
ADB Chief Economist Yasuyuki Sawada explained that the bank’s new report provides an expanded picture of the potentially significant economic impact of the emerging corona virus and highlights the important role that political interventions can play to help mitigate the damage to economies and these results can provide governments with a policy guide Relevant while developing and implementing measures to contain the pandemic and mitigate its effects on the economy and people.
The report also indicates that border closures, travel restrictions and closures applied by countries affected by the pandemic in order to halt the spread of the disease are likely to contribute to a decline in global trade by 1.7 to 2.6 trillion dollars.
The pessimistic outlook on the economic implications of the Corona Virus has echoed similar statements in the statements of the Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, who warned yesterday in an interview with Reuters that the global economy will take much longer than expected at first to fully recover from the shock caused by the virus spread.
Georgieva suggested that the IMF cut its forecast for a contraction of gross domestic product in 2020 of 3 percent and that only a partial recovery takes place next year instead of the 5.8 percent recovery that was initially expected.
The CEO of the International Monetary Fund confirmed that the data received from around the world is worse than expected, noting that this means that "we will take much longer time to fully recover from this crisis."
The paralysis caused by the Corona virus to most of the world's economies did not stop at a particular country, but included many countries in the world where the virus spread, while US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently warned that the largest economy in the world may not fully recover before finding a Corona vaccine .
Basem Kanoon