An acceleration in scaling up manufacturing and sharing enough vaccine doses with low-income countries could have added USD 38 billion to their GDP forecast for 2021 if they had similar vaccination rates as high-income countries, according to the data.
COVID-19 has dealt a major blow to the world’s poorest countries, causing a recession that could push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty. Earlier this year, the World Bank and the IMF urged the group of the richest countries, the G20, to establish the Debt Service Suspension Initiative, or DSSI, as the COVID-19 pandemic started to hit poorer countries worldwide.
The economies of Ethiopia, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ghana, Rwanda and Kenya withstood the economic impact of the pandemic so successfully that they were among the world’s 10 fastest-growing in 2020. At least five of them are expected to remain in that elite growth club through 2022, according to forecasts by economists compiled by Bloomberg during the past three months
China's ability to contain the spread of the pandemic in three months gave it room to open up sectors like manufacturing, trade, travel and domestic tourism, as well as a highly controlled aviation industry.
