Browsing: africa covid

This comes as the IMF has downgraded economic prospects for countries in this cluster. The downgrades have, however, been offset relatively by projections for some commodity producers and exporters that were upgraded on the back of rising commodity prices.

The economic prospects between wealthy nations and low-income countries are expected to be divergent and this divergence will remain of great concern to multilateral lenders and world leaders. In wealthy nations, for example, aggregate output for the cluster economies is expected to regain its pre-pandemic trend path in 2022 and exceed it by 0.9% in 2024 whereas the cluster of nations comprise emerging markets and developing economies (excluding China) will remain 5.5% below their pre-pandemic forecasts in 2024.

This event should it occur as forecast will set back improvements in living standards.…

Vaccine diplomacy will take centre stage for the global political economy in 2021. It is rapidly emerging as an important tool in the arsenal of global superpowers as they seek to expand their geostrategic influence amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Affordable and equitable access to Covid vaccines has the potential to shape the global economic recovery, and speedy and effective rollout represents a huge opportunity to redraw global power maps and reshape strategic alliances. Naturally, the stakes are high, and the competition is intense to achieve both first-mover advantage and scale.

Africa will emerge as a theatre of competition. But with limited financial resources and a lack of bargaining power the option set will be limited for African countries as they try to procure the vaccine. This lopsided power dynamic, which has entrenched them firmly at the back of the vaccine queue, is being described as vaccine apartheid. John Nkengasong of …