Southeast Asian Economies Face Generational Downturn from COVID-19
It has long been acknowledged that the health impacts of the coronavirus pandemic could eventually be dwarfed by the economic effects of the measures designed to bring the contagion under control. Since March, when the World Health Organization official declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the world has seen a cascade of depressing economic projections: a barrel of red ink sprayed across the world’s economic balance-sheets.
The latest entry in this catalog of economic gloom came on September 29, with the publication of the World Bank’s latest report on the East Asia and Pacific region.
The report claims that due to the economic downturn unleashed by COVID-19, the number of poor people in the region is set to rise for the first time in 20 years. Despite its relative success in containing the pandemic, the region is likely to witness a rapidly growing class of “new COVID poor,” with up to 38 million people set to remain mired or fall back into poverty by the end of 2020.
Click here to keep reading. Sebastian Strangio writes for The Diplomat.