The blanket of uncertainty that continues to hover over occasional interventions that seek to reassure that there is some reasonable time frame to the lifespan of the coronavirus pandemic is beginning to occupy more room in the psyche of the international community. It is a state of mind that derives from what has now become ‘a hedging of bets’ amongst international organisations as to just where the global economy – and particularly the economies of poor countries – is heading.
It was, in effect, more of the same with last Tuesday’s attempt by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to proffer its most recent perspective as to just where the global economy is headed at the present time and how, going forward, the vicissitudes of the pandemic might change the situation from one point in time to the next.
To their credit, the IMF and its Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva, have been doing their best to update us on how the global economy is faring from one period to the next in the fierce blizzard of the pandemic. The IMF Director General has been infusing measured doses of reassurance and unpalatable truths into her now frequent briefings on the evolving fortunes of a global economy confronted by some of its biggest challenges in living memory. What the IMF’s seemingly carefully managed public information platform has managed to accomplish are offerings that lay bare the ‘bottom line’ of the socio-economic crisis in which the world finds itself whilst seeking earnestly to avoid being cast as a Prophet of Doom.
What it seems Ms Georgieva is seeking to do is to avoid excursions into unchecked optimism that have the effect of leaving pragmatism too far behind and thereby upending the image which the Fund seeks to project as a level-headed, reliable institution that seeks to provide leadership in a circumstance which, more than any other in our recent history, requires, honest and responsible behaviour.
Which is precisely why the Fund’s recent encouraging upgrading of its economic outlook for the world’s wealthy countries is tempered with what it believes to be an honest, pragmatic downgrading of the forecast for poorer countries, going forward.
Where Latin America and the Caribbean are concerned, the IMF’s Managing Director hinges her prognosis for gross domestic product for Latin America and the Caribbean in the period ahead almost entirely on the stronger economic outlooks which the Fund sees for its two largest economies, Mexico and Brazil. Not a great deal is said about the particular likely fortunes of the rest of the hemisphere which, incidentally, includes all of the Caribbean Community, going forward.
Significantly, one of the more significant points made in the IMF’s prognosis for the economic well-being of the hemisphere, going forward, has to do with the role that Covid-19 vaccinations have to play in helping to sustain rebounds from the prevailing recession. This is where the rubber hits the road since the Fund, in its latest prognosis, has downgraded its forecast for the economies of those poorer countries in the region which it says are hampered in their recovery pursuits by shortcomings in their vaccination regimes.
On the whole, the Fund says, it anticipates a 5.8% overall economic growth in the region this year, up 1.2 percentage points from its April forecast, though that figure, in itself, says little about the particular growth-related fortunes of Caribbean countries, going forward.
Perhaps the most salient point made in reports that have to do with the Fund’s immediate-term prognosis for the fortunes of the poorer countries in the period ahead has to do with the fact that the real bottom line in terms of the growth of countries, going forward, has to do with the widening gap between ‘the vaccine haves and have nots.’ Which is precisely why the issues of vaccine distribution has, for some time now, become an inherent part of the wider ‘rich-poor debate’ in which poor countries are now openly lampooning slogans like ‘one world to share’, which slogans had, a few decades ago, been part of the ‘language’ of international relations.
Conceivably, the challenge for the IMF and the various other bodies that drive contemporary international relations is that it could get much worse. No one, it seems, given what we are told are the ‘new’ strains of the virus that have now materialised, is prepared, any longer to hazard time frames within which the pandemic will ‘run its course’. Indeed, there are indications that some rich countries are beginning to fashion a kind of long-haul mindset which includes the allocation of their greater material resources to the task of self-preservation.
Earlier indications that the advent of the coronavirus would expose the rich/poor axiom to which we have historically been accustomed were reflected in the outburst earlier this year by World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus when he remarked that, at the time, on average, one in four people in rich countries have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine – compared with only one in 500 in low-income nations. There is no reason to believe that comparatively, the disparity has shifted significantly.
It is precisely this kind of uncertainty with regard to just where the pandemic is taking us that led to the recent comment by IMF’s Chief Economist Gita Gopinath that “the recovery is not assured until the pandemic is beaten back globally.”
Nor did she neglect to remind rich countries of their pledge to supply one billion doses of the vaccine to poor ones with a minimum of delay. We must wait and see whether the ‘one world’ notion that reposes at the very heart of international organisation will obtain in this instance or whether it may have already collapsed at the hurdle of coronavirus.
