Even after over a year of COVID-19 being announced as a pandemic, the pandemic’s onslaught continues to cast a dark shadow of uncertainty through concerted health, economic, and humanitarian crises playing out synchronously across the world. The COVID-19 crisis stands out for three reasons. First, the global economic recession that is unfolding as a result of the health emergency and containment measures is the worst since the Great Depression, 1929-1933. Second, there is uncertainty about the intensity, span, duration, and the ‘end-game’ of the pandemic. Third, the crisis is unusual in its combination of shocks on three simultaneous fronts: demand, supply, and financial intermediation, limiting the efficacy of a standard rulebook for stimulating aggregate demand during economic stagnation. In a nutshell, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted supply chains, shut or threatened the survival of small and informal enterprises, and made people highly vulnerable to falling back into poverty through widespread loss of income and jobs.
