Covid-19 And Its Impact And Repercussions On Global World

The global economy as a whole, irrespective of developed and developing economies; has been passing through a very critical juncture, affecting almost all the economic and social indicators of the economies across the globe. The economic and social damage is so huge that for every country, it is becoming very difficult to review their respective economic and social indicators and put their respective economies back on the track. With this backdrop, the present paper discusses the trends emerging out from the outbreak of COVID-19; effects on global trade; repercussions of COVID-19 and how to minimize the loss economic and social due to outbreak of COVID-19.

- Dr. Badar Alam Iqbal

Introduction

The outbreak of COVID-19 in January 2020 has been recognized at global level as an emergency of public health. The number of confirmed cases around the world as of May 22, 2020 are 49, 93, 470 with around 3, 27, 738 deaths affecting 216 countries (WHO, 2020). Due to lack of the virus specific vaccine and the severity of it, most of the economies around the world are adopting quarantine and lockdown as the precautionary measure to stop the spread of the virus. However, the impact of virus is not only limited to personal health but also started affecting economic health of economies because of lockdown of various economic activities both inter-countries as well as intra-countries. Not only developed economies (such as UK, USA, Japan, Germany and others) but also emerging and developing economies (such as China, India and others) are on the threshold limit to fall down. Economic institutions like IMF and OECD has already predicted the probable growth rate of economies around the world (Table 1).

Table 1: Economic Predictions by International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Organization for Economic Corporation and Development (OECD) after the outbreak of COVID 19 (Percentage Change in Real GDP Growth).

Accordingly, for the year 2020 and 2021, in case of developed economies the loss of GDP will be of around 7.8 percent and for developing and emerging economies it will be around 2 percent. In cumulative terms the loss of GDP globally because of the pandemic will be around 9 trillion dollars during 2020-21. It is expected that the impact of COVID-19 is going to be worse on economies than what the world has faced because of the financial crisis of 2008 (Gopinath, 2020).

Effects of COVID-19 on World Trade