Countries are taking unprecedented measures to combat the spread of the disease, while ameliorating its pernicious effect on the economy and labour market.

Find out the policies implemented by governments, employers’ and workers’ organizations, and the ILO in 188 countries and territories.

Physical distancing is an important part of measures to control covid-19, but exactly how far away and for how long contact is safe in different contexts is unclear. Rules that stipulate a single specific physical distance (1 or 2 metres) between individuals to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing covid-19, are based on an outdated, dichotomous notion of respiratory droplet size. This overlooks the physics of respiratory emissions, where droplets of all sizes are trapped and moved by the exhaled moist and hot turbulent gas cloud that keeps them concentrated as it carries them over metres in a few seconds.12 After the cloud slows sufficiently, ventilation, specific patterns of airflow, and type of activity become important. Viral load of the emitter, duration of exposure, and susceptibility of an individual to infection are also important.

En este documento se presenta una propuesta de estimación y análisis comparado de la sostenibilidad de la deuda pública para los países de Centroamérica para el período 2018-2023. Se pone especial énfasis en las trayectorias de deuda y en los factores internos y externos que pueden modificar dichas sendas, incluyendo el efecto de la pandemia por COVID-19. El objetivo es estimar las posibles trayectorias de la deuda pública en el largo plazo, y evidenciar los riesgos existentes, de acuerdo con supuestos económicos probables, dadas las condiciones de cada país.

This joint IMF-World Bank note provides a set of high-level recommendations that can guide national regulatory and supervisory responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and offers an overview of measures taken across jurisdictions to date.

The COVID-19 crisis has affected societies and economies around the globe and will permanently reshape our world as it continues to unfold. While the fallout from the crisis is both amplifying familiar risks and creating new ones, change at this scale also creates new openings for managing systemic challenges, and ways to build back better.

Of the 740 million women working in the informal economy,11 42 per cent are found in the abovementioned high-risk sectors, compared to 32 per cent of men.12 Lockdowns and curfews, compounded by limited, if any, access to social protection provisions – including health care, income and food support, and maternity protection – worsen their social and economic situation. For instance, women homeworkers who produce for global supply chains are particularly affected by COVID-19, as their incomes depend heavily on now suspended orders from high-income countries.13 In this context, when gender intersects with other personal characteristics, such as ethnicity, nationality, age, disability or HIV status, there is a risk that both gender disparities and intra-women inequalities will widen further.

FDI flows are expected to fall by more than 30% in 2020 even under the most optimistic scenario for the success of the public health and economic support policy measures taken by governments to address the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession. FDI flows to developing countries are expected to drop even more because sectors that have been severely impacted by the pandemic, including the primary and manufacturing sectors, account for a larger share of their FDI than in developed economies.

The COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to contain the virus are exacting a staggering economic toll in countries around the world. China’s economy shrank 6.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020 on a year-on-year basis, and Eurozone economies shrank at a14.8 percent annualized rate. In the United States, nearly 28 million persons filed new claims for unemployment benefits over the six-week period ending April 25. 1 The U.S. economy shrank at an annualized rate of 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020, and many analysts project it will shrink at a rate of 25% or more in the second quarter.2 Yet, even as much of the economy is shuttered, some firms are expanding in response to pandemic-induced demand shifts. As noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The coronavirus pandemic is forcing the fastest reallocation of labor since World War II, with companies and governments mobilizing an army of idled workers into new activities that are urgently needed.”3 In other words, Covid-19 is also a major reallocation shock.

This report presents a set of policies to mitigate the impacts and groups them in three overlapping phases: Coping, Managing Continuity, and Improving and Accelerating. The guiding principle are to use every opportunity, in each phase, to do things better. This includes the provision of incentives, such as school feeding and school health programmes, to maximize reenrolment and attendance as schools reopen. By learning from innovations and emergency processes, systems can adapt and scale up the more effective solutions. In doing so, they could become more effective, more agile, and more resilient. A vision and proactive action will help not only mitigate the damage from the current crisis, but could turn recovery into real growth.

Durante 2019 la escasa dinámica de la economía regional se puso de manifiesto en la debilidad de la generación de empleo asalariado —específicamente, de empleo registrado— y en el leve aumento interanual de la tasa de desocupación como promedio ponderado a nivel nacional. Los primeros meses de 2020 están marcados por la irrupción de la pandemia de la enfermedad por coronavirus (COVID-19), que hizo necesaria la aplicación de políticas de confinamiento. Esta situación redundó en la interrupción de las actividades económicas a una escala nunca antes vista a nivel mundial. Los países de América Latina y el Caribe deberán enfrentar grandes caídas de su producto interno bruto con importantes consecuencias en sus mercados laborales, en un contexto de debilidad y vulnerabilidad macroeconómica.

The global COVID-19 quarantine has meant less air pollution in cities and clearer skies. Animals are strolling through public spaces, and sound pollution has diminished, allowing us to hear the birds sing.

But these relatively small and temporary changes should not be mistaken for the COVID-19 pandemic actually helping to fix climate change. Quite the contrary: the pandemic that made the world stop offers a glimpse of the deep changes in lifestyles and economic structures that we need to implement if we are to effectively mitigate the worst of climate change.

In essence, the banking union is an exercise in risk diversification, achieved by pooling banking risks and regulatory controls among euro area countries. The strategy involved three interrelated lines of action: strengthening the solvency of banks; enhancing their efficiency; and fostering area-wide diversification and integration of the banking industry.

“La crisis es el accidente más la desestabilización. Combina el desencadenamiento de dificultades, el desorden en el funcionamiento de las organizaciones y divergencias en cuanto a las opciones fundamentales. Con la crisis, la cuestión de la información del público se vuelve central. No se trata solamente de aplicar soluciones listas para ser empleada en problemas definidos. Será preciso legitimar la propia acción, mantener la credibilidad, hacer gala de eficacia en la ayuda a la población.”

The COVID-19 lockdown in the U.S. began at a time of relatively mild weather and very few natural disasters, so for the past few months, the country has been able to focus mainly on the pandemic. But this week, two dams in Michigan failed after heavy rains and flooding, forcing 11,000 people to evacuate while trying to social distance. The floodwaters also threatened the Dow Chemical plant and two hazardous Superfund waste sites, which could have precipitated an environmental disaster. In India and Bangladesh, the most powerful cyclone in more than a decade forced over three million people to evacuate as relief teams tried to protect them against infection from COVID-19.

World trade was already slowing in 2019 before the COVID-19 outbreak. WTO trade statistics show that the volume of world merchandise trade shrank by 0.1% in 2019, marking the first annual decline since 2009, during the global financial crisis. Trade was relatively weak in the final quarter of 2019, but this is unlikely to have been influenced by COVID-19, which was first detected very late in the year. The seasonally-adjusted volume of world merchandise trade in Q4 was down 1.0% year-on-year and 1.2% compared to the previous quarter. Growth was held back by persistent trade tensions and by slowing economic activity in major economies.