‘Vaccine policy is economic policy,’ IMF chief stresses

Both the IMF managing director and World Bank president warned of growing global economic inequality on Wednesday.

Unprecedented policy response and speedy vaccine development helped pull the global economy back from the brink last year, but the outlook is still marked by severe uncertainty and increasingly lopsided access to wealth and opportunity, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) managing director said on Wednesday. “There is light at the end of the tunnel,” IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said at a virtual news conference on the second day of the World Bank and IMF’s week-long spring meetings. “This could have been another Great Depression.” The IMF lifted its global growth forecast to 6 percent in 2021 and 4.4 percent in 2022 on Tuesday. But the upgrade is driven primarily by rebounds in the United States, China and India.