Economic impact from covid-19: OECD’s recommendations

Letter from Angel Gurría (OECD Secretary-General) in which the OECD calls to take measures to provide the necessary resources to deal with the immediate public health emergency and the economic shock and to develop a path towards recovery once we win this war.

• The inseparable ingredient in all its recommendations is international collaboration and coordination. Ultimately, the letter is a defense of multilateralism as the best way to deal with global issues: “In our global world, many issues cannot be dealt with anymore within domestic boundaries, be it a virus, trade, migration, environmental damages or terrorism. Multilateral action creates positive spillovers that will be more effective for each country than if they acted alone”.
• OECD calls for an ambitious, sizeable, credible, and internationally coordinated plan: “We need a level of ambition similar to that of the Marshall plan–which created the OECD–and a vision akin to that of the New Deal, but now at the global level”
  
• The letter also points to the fact that the global economy had before the covid-19 some vulnerabilities which could make worse the recession started by the covid-19 outbreak. “Before the outbreak, the global economy already exhibited a number of underlying vulnerabilities, which now risk worsening the downturn that covid-19 has delivered. These include the high level of corporate debt and trade tensions between major economies. Another vulnerabilities are the gaps in income, wealth and job stability in many countries, which threaten a large part of our populations”.