Countries To Pay Economic Price For Failing To Control COVID-19

Is the COVID-19 pandemic in your country within control?  This may become, perhaps the most important question for all of us today as the world economies are showing significant performance variations in 2021 due to slower vaccination rollouts and a surge in virus infections in several countries.

Up until recently, world leaders had called for a coordinated effort to control the pandemic. But, now the growth prospects of a global economic rebound look dim. Advanced economies are likely to become more powerful while the emerging economies may lag behind as many of them, so far, have failed to control the pandemic.

What are the implications of failing to control the pandemic? Are Muslim-majority countries ready to contain the deadly outbreak?

According to an article published in the Economist, “Covid-19 is a disease of the poor and the powerless”.  The people and countries most affected by the disease in the economic sense of the word will be poor countries. As these weaker economies are showing poorer performance they will have to pay a heavy price by experiencing much slower performance than advanced economies like China, the US, and Japan.  Emerging economies like Indonesia, Pakistan may feel strong pressure from the IMF and the World Bank to control their domestic policies by further spiraling the poverty they are suffering from.

Countries like Jordan want to open their economies, especially after Eid if they are able to control the pandemic. However, the path to full recovery from the outbreak looks bleak as they do not have much control of vaccination supply and a fresh wave of infections is hitting hard.

As these countries are poor, most of their workforce has to go out to earn their living. Due to the nature of their occupations, they are unable to perform their duties from home.  They have to be in public places find and do their work while exposing themselves to the deadly virus.

That makes these weak economies more vulnerable to the economic problems they will face in the near future.

What Do Emerging Economies Need To Do?

To control and reduce the havoc the COVID-19 has caused, and continues to do so in these countries, they may need to do the following

• Negotiate a safe and speedy supply of vaccines as a regional group instead of trying to secure on individual country levels
• Start producing vaccines locally instead of just depending on advanced economies for donations
• Develop special storage facilities to keep the vaccine safe at the required temperature levels

If emerging economies do not take swift action to control the economic damage caused due to the pandemic, they will become the biggest losers.