The economic downturn since the Great Depression: a future approach

Abstract

The peak of the pandemic and the necessary containment for it in the second quarter of the year for most countries of the world, and then its decline in the second half of the year, we expect in the April issue of the World Economic Outlook report that global growth in 2020 will drop to -3%, down from 6.3 percentage point in January 2020, which is a significant adjustment in a very short period. This makes the "Great Lockdown" the worst recession since the Great Depression years, and much worse than the global financial crisis. The problem is that this expected recovery is only a partial recovery, because the level of economic activity is expected to remain lower than the level indicated by previous expectations for this year, before the virus strikes.