Plenary V: Democracy in Crisis?

The Atlantic Current’s 7th edition provides a unique overview and in-depth analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic as seen from the Atlantic, and the challenges it poses for the region. In this edition, the authors examine how SARS-CoV-2 has proved to be a destabilizing force in a wide range of sectors such as health, international relations, trade, energy or the economy. This report aims to examine and assess the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis while endeavoring to learn from these n ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced a major shift in Carolina Zuheill Rosales’ career. This internal medicine doctor founded Guimedic in 2011, when she was 25. Through its mobile clinics, this NGO provides medical consultations in remote and poor areas throughout Mexico. The main focus is to treat indigenous communities. Because of a structural lack of medical access to these populations, she has launched in March 2020 Promesa, a social business that is using artificial intelligence. ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new vulnerabilities in social, infrastructure, and governance systems. In the first months of the pandemic, there was a genuine concern about the capacity of the Global South to contain the spread of the virus. African cities were particularly vulnerable, with some experts1, including the head of WHO2, predicting a catastrophe for the continent. Despite the structural and chronic challenges that African cities face, including informality, poverty, a ...

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on Africa, focusing on the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, based on information available as of October 2020. We first identify the two key long-term issues of the SSA countries before the crisis: resource dependency and slow productivity growth. COVID-19 has hit SSA countries hard, causing human and economic destruction and wiping out economic progress from the last decade. Instead of growing at 2.9% in 2020, as ...

This article was originally published on IMF blog.  The road to recovery for the Middle East and Central Asia region will hinge on containment measures, access to and distribution of vaccines, the scope of policies to support growth, and measures to mitigate economic scarring from the pandemic. The virus’s second wave, which began in September, hurt many countries in the region, where infection and death rates far surpassed those seen during the first wave . Most countries resumed ...