Narrow Your Choices

Refine By Type

Refine By Countries

Refine By Topic

Refine By Series

Refine By Language

  • Japanese (1)

Refine By Date

—

Refine By IMF Taxonomy

Refine By JEL Taxonomy

Refine by LOC Taxonomy

Refine By THEMA Taxonomy

  • Print
  • Save

Browse

You are looking at 1 - 1 of 1 items for :

  • Cross-cutting issues x
  • Macroeconomics x
  • Asia and Pacific x
  • Society and Social Sciences x
  • Health and Fitness x
  • Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth x
  • Population & demography x
  • Refine By Language: Japanese x
Clear All
Cover Staff Discussion Notes
A Proposal to End the COVID-19 Pandemic
Ruchir Agarwal and Ms. Gita Gopinath
Urgent steps are needed to arrest the rising human toll and economic strain from the COVID-19 pandemic that are exacerbating already-diverging recoveries. Pandemic policy is also economic policy as there is no durable end to the economic crisis without an end to the health crisis. Building on existing initiatives, this paper proposes pragmatic actions at the national and multilateral level to expeditiously defeat the pandemic. The proposal targets: (1) vaccinating at least 40 percent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 and at least 60 percent by the first half of 2022, (2) tracking and insuring against downside risks, and (3) ensuring widespread testing and tracing, maintaining adequate stocks of therapeutics, and enforcing public health measures in places where vaccine coverage is low. The benefits of such measures at about $9 trillion far outweigh the costs which are estimated to be around $50 billion—of which $35 billion should be paid by grants from donors and the residual by national governments potentially with the support of concessional financing from bilateral and multilateral agencies. The grant funding gap identified by the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator amounts to about $22 billion, which the G20 recognizes as important to address. This leaves an estimated $13 billion in additional grant contributions needed to finance our proposal. Importantly, the strategy requires global cooperation to secure upfront financing, upfront vaccine donations, and at-risk investment to insure against downside risks for the world.
Keywords:
COVID-19; Pandemic; Economic crisis; pandemic policy; financing facilities; donor country; LMIC vaccination; vaccination target; Income; Manufacturing; Global; Africa