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Economic Governance in a Post-Covid World

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Augusto Lopez-Claros The COVID-19 crisis is the largest shock to the global economy since the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The impact has been highly destabilising and global in scope and perhaps no statistic captures more eloquently its welfare costs than that for the first time in 3 decades in 2020 we saw a sharp increase in the number of people classified by the World Bank as “extremely poor;” about 120 million people joined the ranks of the very poor, a reversal likely to continue in 2021, the incipient economic recovery notwithstanding. Not surprisingly the crisis has raised multiple questions about our economic system, its resilience to shocks and, more generally, whether it is on a sustainable path. What are some of the lessons that can be drawn from this past year? Restoring public spending priorities COVID-19 has found the majority of countries totally unprepared to deal effectively with its devastating consequences. Even high-income countries have seen their hospitals