Apart from the tragic human consequences of the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic, the economic uncertainty it has sparked will likely cost the global economy $1 trillion in 2020, the UN’s trade and development agency, UNCTAD, said.
“We envisage a slowdown in the global economy to under two per cent for this year, and that will probably cost in the order of $1 trillion, compared with what people were forecasting back in September,” said Richard Kozul-Wright, Director, Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at UNCTAD.
Launching the UNCTAD report as world financial markets tumbled over concerns about supply-chain interruptions from China, and oil price uncertainty among major producers, Mr. Kozul-Wright warned that few countries were likely to be left unscathed by the outbreak’s financial ramifications.
One “Doomsday scenario” in which the world economy grew at only 0.5 per cent, would involve “a $2 trillion hit” to gross domestic product, he said, adding that collapsing oil prices had been “a contributing factor to that growing sense of unease and panic”.
While it was difficult to predict how the international financial markets will react to COVID-19’s impacts “what they do suggest is a world that is extremely anxious”, he said.
“There’s a degree of anxiety now that’s well beyond the health scares which are very serious and concerning.”
To counter these fears, “Governments need to spend at this point in time to prevent the kind of meltdown that could be even more damaging than the one that is likely to take place over the course of the year”, Mr. Kozul-Wright insisted.
Turning to Europe and the Eurozone, Mr. Kozul-Wright noted that its economy had already been performing “extremely badly towards the end of 2019”.
It was “almost certain to go into recession over the coming months; and the Germany economy is particularly fragile, but the Italian economy and other parts of the European periphery are also facing very serious stresses right now as a consequence of trends over (the last few) days.”
Describing many parts of the Latin American region as similarly vulnerable, he added that Argentina in particular “will be struggling as a consequence of the knock-on effects of this crisis”.
