Even as the economic implications of the Covid-19 pandemic lay bare the extent of the economic crisis that it is likely to leave behind for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the Economic Commission for Latin America is mounting a lobby for an extensive reform of the international financial system designed to address the challenges associated with the debt burden and the various other economic deformities that the pandemic is likely to leave behind.
Addressing the recent Inter-American Dialogue Conference Call on the Coronavirus and its consequences for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena asserted that the prevailing international financial system may well be no longer sufficiently robust to cope with the magnitude of the hemisphere’s economic woes.
So significant has the extent of the hemisphere’s debt problems become, Bárcena says, that it now has to assign 59 per cent of its exports of goods and services to the servicing of its external debt.
