The Covid-19 pandemic has been like wartime, with nothing else on the news, less to spend money on, dramatic winners and losers in business, and rocketing national debt. If 2020 was the year of hostilities, then 2021 should — eventually — become the year of peace, beginning the slow process of economic restoration. It also offers an opportunity, as US president-elect Joe Biden might say, to build back better.
Back in April, with half the world’s population in lockdown, the International Monetary Fund predicted the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with 2020 global growth contracting by 3%. In mid-September, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published its latest economic outlook, it took an even dimmer view, forecasting 4.5%. However, that view was less downbeat than its June outlook, thanks to better-than-expected first half of 2020 outcomes in China and the US, and the “massive scale” of governmental response.
