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IN CHINA, IT HAPPENED. The United States should get there in the second half of this year. But Italians and South Africans may have to wait until 2023, or even longer.
Those are the dates when production in some of the world’s major economies will return to the pre-COVID-19 status quo, the level reached at the end of 2019, before the new coronavirus hit, according to the latest forecasts from the Monetary Fund. International. (IMF). The numbers reveal an uneven global recovery after the worst recession since World War II.
The pandemic has killed more than 2.1 million people, closed businesses and frozen travel. Inequality between and within countries is expected to increase, and may push 150 million people into extreme poverty, according to the World Bank.
China, the first major economy affected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was also the first to emerge from the crisis. At some point towards the end of June last year, according to official data, gross domestic product (GDP) rebounded beyond its pre-pandemic level. By the end of 2022, according to the IMF, it will be more than 15% larger. Some forecasters expect China to overtake the United States this decade as the world’s leading economy.
It appears that the United States will recover the fastest among developed economies, helped by one of the largest injections of fiscal cash in world history. Annual GDP should exceed the late 2019 figure sometime in the middle of this year, the IMF projects. Japan is another wealthy nation that is recovering quite well, and with a declining population, its performance may look even better when the fund releases per capita figures in April.
The launch of multiple vaccines has boosted hopes for a recovery and prompted the IMF to raise its forecast for global GDP this year. Still, even in that scenario, economies will generally be smaller than the IMF expected in its latest pre-COVID-19 projections, released a year ago.
And in several countries, developed like Spain and the United Kingdom, and emerging countries like Mexico, GDP in late 2022 will likely remain lower than before the pandemic. The new IMF predictions do not go beyond 2022. But based on growth rates forecast for the final quarter of that year, some economies, notably Italy and South Africa, may have difficulty recovering their pre-virus growth rates even in 2023. – Bloomberg
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