IMF SEES 95 % OF COUNTRIES WORSE OFF IN 2020

About 95 percent of countries will be worse off this year, according to projections from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which revised further downward its earlier April forecast by another 1.9 percentage point to 4.9 %.

IMF managing director Kristalina Georgiva bared this in an interview with eKathimerini , where she bared that “both advanced economies and emerging markets will be in recession at the same time.”

Georgiva expressed concern over the march of economic events in view of the economic desolation arising from the Covid 19 pandemic especially the emerging markets and developing economies “where recent development gains in reducing poverty and inequality are now in jeopardy.”

The Philippines, for instance, saw its unemployment rate surged to 17.7 percent as a result of the pandemic, resulting in 7.3 million unemployed as per data from the Philippine Statistics Authority.

Also, poverty incidence level which stood at 16.7 percent in 2018 and projected to go down to 11 percent in 2022 has gone up by 3.3 percentage points.