“At the UN, we’re saying that, if there isn’t a minimum income floor to fall back on when this kind of massive shock hits, people literally have no options. When UN News interviewed a senior official at UNDP, Kanni Wignaraja, she said that the pandemic had upended economies so severely, that bolder ideas were now needed. In May, A report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) proposed that governments ensure immediate temporary cash transfers to help millions of people struggling to meet basic needs, as the massive fallout from COVID-19 rippled across the region’s economies. Is universal basic income the answer?Ĭonfronted by this flood of negative data, the idea of universal basic income (where governments give a minimum sum of money to all citizens, regardless of work status or income) began to gain traction within the UN.
Young people were also particularly affected: more than one in six had stopped working by May and those who were still in work saw their hours cut by almost 23 per cent. The ILO followed up in December, with a report showing that wage increases are slowing, or even reversing, hitting women workers and the low-paid hardest: this trend is expected to continue even with the rollout of vaccines. Mass lay-offs took place in the service sector, particularly industries that involve personal interactions such as tourism, retail, leisure and hospitality, recreation and transportation services. Lower-skilled workers were hard hit, in wealthier as well as developing economies. The following month, the World Bank confirmed that the world was in the middle of the worst recession since World War Two. $8.5 trillion in losses, and the International Labour Organisation ( ILO) warned that nearly half of the global workforce could see their livelihoods destroyed due to the continued decline in working hours brought on by lockdowns. In May, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) forecast that the global economy would shrink by almost 3.2 per cent in 2020, equivalent to some Young and lower-skilled workers bear the brunt The early warning signsĮven before the virus had officially been declared a pandemic, it was clear that the shutdowns, travel bans and other restrictions on movement would be serious.īack in March, the UN trade agency, UNCTAD, was forecasting that around $1 trillion would be lost to the global economy over the year, and the International Monetary Fund ( IMF) and World Bank arranged for a multi-billion dollar injection of UN-back global funds to be made available to low-income and emerging markets.ĭespite this assistance, the outlook, especially for some six billion people living in developing countries, was grim, with UNCTAD warning of a “looming financial tsunami. In part five of our look back at 2020, we focus on the seismic effect that COVID-19 has had on the global economy. With millions forced to work from home this year, offices and shops closing as part of containment measures, and travel severely curtailed everywhere, it was inevitable that the economy would suffer.
0 kommentar(er)
