U.S. COVID-19 cases exceed 600,000, economic reopening under heated discussion

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Tuesday the global economy is on track to contract “sharply” by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “worst recession” since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

“This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, a major revision over a very short period,” IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said at a virtual press conference on the latest World Economic Outlook report released Tuesday.

The report showed that advanced economies will contract significantly by 6.1 percent in 2020, and emerging markets and developing economies, which typically have growth levels well above advanced economies, will shrink by 1.0 percent.

The U.S. economy is expected to contract by 5.9 percent this year, and the euro area will see a decline of 7.5 percent, said the report. Japan’s economic output will shrink by 5.2 percent, and Britain’s will fall by 6.5 percent.

“The report emphasizes the unprecedented scale of the crisis,” Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned professor of economics at Columbia University and a senior UN advisor, told Xinhua via email.

“The IMF predicts a kind of V-shaped recovery, down sharply in 2020, up not quite so sharply in 2021,” Sachs said. “But we might not get such a quick bounce-back because the virus will continue to disrupt public health and therefore the world economy for years to come.”

The IMF reiterated that it’s actively deploying 1-trillion-U.S.-dollar lending capacity to support vulnerable countries, including through rapid-disbursing emergency financing and debt service relief to the poorest member countries, calling on official bilateral creditors to do the same.