Covid-19 the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression: IMF

Covid-19 the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression: IMF.

On April 14 the IMF published its World Economic Outlook. The IMF said the whole world has changed dramatically in the last three months. In an extraordinary catastrophe, many human lives have been lost across the world. Measures such as social distancing and quarantine are being taken to escape the pandemic, and large lockdowns have been imposed around the world. All activity has collapsed as never before. This is unlike any other crisis. As a result, by current estimates, global economic growth in 2020 will be -3%, 6.3% lower than estimated in January 2020. This is the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s, far bigger than the crash of 2008.

If the pandemic subsides in the second quarter of 2020 (April-June), economic activity returns and there is no large-scale unemployment, the IMF expects global growth of 5.8% in 2021. The loss to global GDP (gross domestic product) from the pandemic will be 9 trillion dollars, equal to the entire economies of Germany and Japan. No country can escape this downturn; all countries are in deep recession. The fall in GDP will be -6.1% for the developed countries as a whole, -5.9% for America, -7.5% for the euro area, -7% for Germany and -7.2% for France. China's growth will shrink to 1.2% and India's to 1.9%. This is the scale of the economic collapse the IMF sees.