Telemental Health Grew After Onset of COVID-19, But Vary Across US mHealthIntelligence.com
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Telemental Health Grew After Onset of COVID-19, But Vary Across US - mHealthIntelligence.com
This time last year, concepts such as lockdowns, mask mandates and social distancing were unknown to most of us. Today they are part of our everyday language as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact all aspects of our lives. Through the following 12 charts and graphics, we try to quantify and provide an overview of our colleagues research in the face of a truly unprecedented crisis.
Over the past 12 months, the pandemic has harmed the poor and vulnerable the most, and it is threatening to push millions more into poverty. This year, after decades of steady progress in reducing the number of people living on less than $1.90/day, COVID-19 will usher in the first reversal in the fight against extreme poverty in a generation.
The latest analysis warns that COVID-19 has pushed an additional 88 million people into extreme poverty this year and that figure is just a baseline. In a worst-case scenario, the figure could be as high as 115 million. The World Bank Group forecasts that the largest share ofthe new poor will be in South Asia,with Sub-Saharan Africa close behind. According tothe latestPoverty and Shared Prosperityreport, many of the new poor are likely to be engaged in informal services, construction, and manufacturing the sectors in which economic activity is most affected by lockdowns and other mobility restrictions.
Those restrictions enacted to control the spread of the virus, and thus alleviate pressure on strained and vulnerable health systems have had an enormous impact on economic growth. The June edition of the Global Economic Prospects, put it plainly: COVID-19 has triggered a global crisis like no other a global health crisis that, in addition to an enormous human toll, is leading to the deepest global recession since the Second World War. It forecast that the global economy as well as per capita incomes would shrink this year pushing millions into extreme poverty.
This economic fallout is hampering countries ability to respond effectively to the pandemics health and economic effects. Even before the spread of COVID-19, almost half of all low-income countries were already in debt distress or at a high risk of it, leaving them with little fiscal room to help the poor and vulnerable who were hit hardest.
For this reason, in April, the World Bank and IMF called for the suspension of debt-service payments for the poorest countries to allow them to focus resources on fighting the pandemic. The Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) has enabled these countries to free-up billions of dollars for their COVID-19 response. Yet, as the graph below illustrates, debt service outlays to bilateral creditors will impose a heavy burden for years to come, and quick action to reduce debt will be needed to avoid another lost decade.
As World Bank Group President David Malpass has said, Debt service suspension is an important stopgap, but it is not enough. He added that many more steps are needed on debt relief,including an expansion of DSSI while a more permanent solution can be developed.
Without more action on debt, a sustainable recovery could be stunted in many countries along with a host of other development goals. As Global Economic Prospects noted, while many emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) were able to implement large-scale fiscal and monetary responses during the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, today they are less prepared to weather a global downturn. The most vulnerable of them rely heavily on global trade, tourism, and remittances. The next edition of Global Economic Prospects, including updated forecasts, is due in early January.
Remittances the money that migrants send to their home countries are of special concern. Over previous decades, remittances have played an increasingly important role in alleviating poverty and sustaining growth. Just last year, these flows were on par with foreign direct investment and official development assistance (government-to-government aid).
But COVID-19 has spurred a dramatic reversal, with our latest forecasts finding that remittances will decline 14% by the end of 2021 a slightly improved outlook compared with the earliest estimates during the pandemic, that should not belie the fact that these are historic declines. All regions can expect a drop, with Europe and Central Asia seeing the steepest fall. Associated with these declines, the number of international migrants is likely to fall in 2020 for the first time in modern history as new migration has slowed and return migration has increased.
These drops are cutting off a lifeline for many poor families in developing countries. Migrants remittances are crucial to households around the world, and as they decline, experts fear that poverty will rise, food insecurity will worsen, and households risk losing the means to afford services like healthcare.
The pandemic slowdown has deeply impacted businesses and jobs. Around the world, companies especially micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the developing world are under intense strain, with more than half either in arrears or likely to fall into arrears shortly. To understand the pressure that COVID-19 is having on firms performance as well as the adjustments they are having to make, the World Bank and partners have been conducting rapid COVID-19 Business Pulse Surveys in partnership with client governments.
These offer a glimmer of good news. Responses collected between May and August showed that many of these firms were retaining staff, hoping to keep them on board as they ride out the downturn. More than a third of companies have increased the use of digital technology to adapt to the crisis. The same data warned, however, that the firms sales have dropped by half amid the crisis, forcing companies to reduce hours and wages, and most businesses especially micro and small firms in low-income countries are struggling to access public support.
Reduced family incomes whether due to job loss, a stop in remittance payments, or a multitude of other COVID-19-related factors will continue to put human capital at risk. With less money, families will be forced to make trade-offs and sacrifices that could harm health and learning outcomes for a generation.
The pandemic has highlighted the need for effective, accessible and affordable health care. Even before the crisis began, people in developing countries paid over half-a-trillion dollars out-of-pocket for health care. This costly spending causes financial hardship for more than 900 million people and pushes nearly 90 million people into extreme poverty every year a dynamic almost certainly exacerbated by the pandemic.
And health care is just one way that COVID-19 is affecting countries human capital. Even before the pandemic, the world faced a learning crisis, with 53% of children in low- and middle-income countries unable to read a basic text on completing primary school. Pandemic-led school closures intensify these risks.
At the height of the COVID lockdown, more than 160 countries had mandated some form of school closures for at least 1.5 billion children and youth. Regular updates on global closures can be found here.
COVID-19s effects on education could be felt for decades to come, not just causing a loss of learning in the short term, but also diminishing economic opportunities for this generation of students over the long term. Due to learning losses and increases in dropout rates, this generation of students stand to lose an estimated $10 trillion in earnings, or almost 10 percent of global GDP, and countries will be driven even further off-track to achieving their Learning Poverty goals potentially increasing its levels substantially to 63 percent, equivalent to an additional 72 million primary school aged children.
As economic conditions force families to make difficult decisions on household spending, concerns about student dropout rates have grown. Speaking on our Expert Answers video series, World Bank Global Director for Education Jaime Saavedra said he is particularly worried for students in secondary school and tertiary education. Many in those demographics will not come back to the system because this is going to be a huge economic shock, so families might not have resources or some [students] will have to resort to work, he explained. Others who were previously on the brink of dropping out will be more likely to do so due to the pandemic, Saavedra said.
To mitigate these losses and try to sustain learning amid the crisis, countries are exploring options for remote learning with mixed results. In many places, a key obstacle is a lack of high-quality, affordable broadband.
On the Development Podcast, we spoke to two Colombian mothers who live on opposite sides of the digital divide. We heard about their radically different experience of home-based education.
Their experience is not unique: around the world, the pandemic and associated lockdowns are underscoring that digital connectivity is now a necessity. The internet is the gateway to many essential services, such as e-health platforms, digital cash transfers, and e-payment systems.
Unfortunately, access to digital infrastructure and connectivity remains severely limited in the worlds poorest countries, which are eligible for grants and concessional lending from the World Banks International Development Association (IDA). While mobile coverage has expanded rapidly on a global level, IDA countries still lag far behind, with mobile internet penetration rates of 20.4 percent at the end of 2019, compared to 62.5 percent for other countries.
And while the pandemic demonstrates the need for greater connectivity, it could actually widen the digital divide, as private investments become constrained and public financing is diverted to urgent policy priorities like health and social protection.5
AndCOVID-19also posesa serious threat toother development divides. Notably,gender gaps could widenduring and after the pandemic.Thiscould reversewomens and girlsdecades-longgains in human capital, economic empowerment,andvoice and agency.
At the beginning of the year the Women, Business and the Law report noted considerable progress in womens economic opportunity over the past 50 years. For example, in 1970, just two countries had laws mandating equal renumeration for work of equal value. As the chart below shows, that situation has significantly changed in 50 years. But even today more than two thirds of economies could still improve legislation affecting womens pay.
Of course, equal pay is just one aspect of gender equality. Across multiple indicators, the pandemic is exacerbating risks for women and threatening hard-fought-for gains. As this crises has unfolded, women have lost their jobs at a faster rate than men, due to the fact that they are more likely to be employed in sectors hardest hit by lockdowns, such as tourism and retail. Additionally, women in low- and middle-income countries are more likely to be predominantly employed in informal jobs, which often means they lack access to social protection and other safety nets.
And the next generation? Girls in many countries may face increased expectations to take on care-related tasks that could affect their ability to stay engaged in education over the long term. Our partners at UNESCO have projected that 11 million girls might never return to their studies following the pandemic.
Beyond education, children male and female are also vulnerable to the global rise in food insecurity, affecting people in both urban and rural settings. Our World Development Indicators show that even before COVID-19 emerged, the number of people who were undernourished an indicator that tracks how many people fail to access sufficient calories was increasing, after decades of decline.
Like with so many other aspects of global development, COVID-19 stands to exacerbate this already worrying trend. The pandemic may add between 83 and 132 million people to the total number of undernourished in the world in 2020, according to a preliminary assessment by our partners at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). FAOs data helps underpin the World Bank Groups World Development Indicators.
In many places, food insecurity and COVID have compounded the impact of fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV), which threatens a reversal of progress on development. In 2000, one out of five of the worlds extremely poor people lived in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS). Since then, poverty has fallen steadily in other economies, but the number of poor people living in FCS continues to grow.
Today, around half the worlds poor reside in fragile and conflict-affected situations. In fact, poverty is becoming more concentrated in these places, which will be home to up to two-thirds of the worlds extremely poor people by 2030. COVID-19 is likely to further exacerbate this trend.
For FCV, food insecurity, and a number of other challenges, climate change is a threat multiplier. Even as the world focuses on the pandemic, climate shocks, natural disasters and ecosystem loss have not stopped. But how we respond to COVID-19 can help strengthen how we are able to handle future risks and shocks. As governments take urgent action and lay the foundations for their financial, economic, and social recovery, they have a unique opportunity to create economies that are more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient.
To support a resilient recovery, the World Bank Group will continue to make major investments that help countries integrate climate action into their development agendas.
The Group has steadily increased our climate financing: having committed $83 billion to climate-related investments over the last five years and exceeding our targets for each of the last three years. We will further boost support for countries to accelerate climate action and boost resilience to its mounting impacts. Amid COVID-19, this means looking at ways to align short-term objectives like job creation and economic growth with long-term goals like decarbonization, adaptation, and resilience to help our client countries shape a sustainable recovery.
Conclusion
The impact of COVID-19 has drawn numerous comparisons some to the Global Financial crisis of 20072008, others to World War II, and more still to crises we know only from history books. While these may seem dramatic, the pandemic has had wide-ranging impact on nearly every aspect of development, like few crises before it.
The full scale of the pandemic will only be known in years to come, as we collect and analyze the data, adapt and evolve our financing to meet countries needs, and continue our work to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity. To pursue this mission effectively, we will remain a long-term partner to our client countries, providing the data, technical assistance, and financing that will be needed to navigate the global community out of this truly global crisis.
Sara Haddad, Paul McClure, Jasmin Buttar, Bassam Sebti, Srimathi Sridhar and Christine Montgomery contributed to this project.
The World Bank Groups Response to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) Pandemic
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2020 Year in Review: The impact of COVID-19 in 12 charts - World Bank Blogs
In the wake of COVID-19, there have been calls for the world to be better prepared for the next pandemic. These calls are driven by a sense that the outbreak could have been foreseen and prevented, or that the spread could have been more effectively contained causing less social and economic disruption and averting deaths.
Such calls have been made in the past and have resulted in meaningful action. Yet, the world tends to move on quickly, with new crises taking center stage, resulting in the now familiar cycle of panic and neglect. This is a concern: although the timing and nature of the next pandemic spark is unknowable, it is certain to happen.
Perhaps things will be different this time. COVID-19 has brought into sharp focus the limitations of past efforts and the need for a more ambitious and sustained approach to preparedness. It is encouraging to see widespread calls for more financing, a reform of global governance for health-related crises, and fresh thinking around global public goods.
But lets first take a look at what pandemic preparedness is and what types of investments it requires.
Preparedness starts at country level and comprises many elements. First and foremost, it requires strong and resilient health systems, in particular primary care, to facilitate detection of disease outbreaks, provide essential care, and support deployment of vaccines and other medical countermeasures. Second, it requires surveillance systems and laboratory capacity to detect both human and zoonotic disease outbreaks. Third, mechanisms are needed for coordination across sectors for prevention and preparedness. Fourth, preparedness requires legal frameworks and regulatory instruments to support both outbreak prevention and the deployment of countermeasures. Fifth, there is a need for well-functioning supply-chains as well as adequate stockpiles of essential goods and equipment.
These and other elements of preparedness are established and reflected in the approach to the Joint External Evaluation Tool that emerged from the 2005 International Health Regulations.
As pathogens do not respect borders, there are also important cross-country dimensions of preparedness, with regional, and sub-regional institutions playing key roles in areas such as regulatory harmonization, standards for reporting and information sharing on disease outbreaks, sharing of key public health assets such as high complexity laboratories, and pooled procurement.
Many countries, especially low- and middle-income countries, have long-standing weaknesses in these preparedness domains, which translate into weaknesses at the regional level as well. Even countries with stronger preparedness were profoundly challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting vulnerabilities associated with the breakdown of global supply chains, and the role that a lack of trust, cohesion, and mechanisms for intra-government coordination have played in undermining response.
The World Bank, though IDA and IBRD, has a strong track record in providing the long-term, predictable, sustained financing that countries need to prepare for pandemics, often requiring multi-sectoral interventions. For example, using a One Health approach, that recognizes the linkages between human and animal health, and the environment, the Regional Disease Surveillance Systems Enhancement (REDISSE) program, developed in the wake of the Ebola crisis, has helped strengthen national and regional capacity for disease surveillance and epidemic preparedness across 16 countries in West and Central Africa. We have also supported the Africa CDC through IDA financing. As we help countries to address the current pandemic with our $157 billion COVID support package, the largest in our history, we continue to help build capacity to prepare for future pandemics. Whats more, both IDA and IBRD leverage significant resources in the capital markets: IDA now provides more than $3 in concessional finance for every dollar of donor contribution; for IBRD, one dollar of additional capital can enable additional $10 in financing to clients.
Looking ahead, the World Banks suite of financing mechanisms and instruments, global footprint, strong in-country presence, multisectoral expertise, and broad reach to policymakers positions us well to expand support for country and regional preparedness. Preparedness will be an important focus of IDA20, and it is set to feature more prominently in our country engagements.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also highlighted the need for action at the global level and a large share of proposed increases in international finance for preparedness is focused on addressing perceived gaps in the global domain.
Financing needs at the global level are diverse and complex. One key priority is to step up the financing of R&D on therapeutics and vaccines. This area is receiving significant public, private, and philanthropic financing, including in support of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which is set up as a World Bank-supported FIF and seeks to positively disrupt financing models for vaccines against epidemic diseases.
Equally important is the financing for medical countermeasures to ensure timely and equitable access for all countries. On the demand side, this will require building on our collective experience with pooled procurement mechanisms like COVAX and the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT). On the supply side, there is a need to boost distributed manufacturing capacity to ensure equitable access to low-cost vaccines. Not every country needs its own vaccine manufacturing capacity, but we need to ensure that there is sufficient production capacity in developing countries that can be quickly scaled up. Pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to invest without some degree of demand and price certainty, which is where advanced market commitments backed by donor financing can help.
The ambitious preparedness agenda has generated calls for scaling up financing. The G20 HLIP estimated that US$34 billion of public financing per year is needed over the next five years, with nearly half coming from donors. More recently, the US government has called for a US$10 billion global health fund to prepare for future pandemics and announced a US$250 million contribution to jumpstart the effort. It has been proposed that the fund be established at the World Bank.
Additional financing for preparedness could help expand the support that the World Bank and others provide to countries and regional institutions and help address gaps at the global level.
A key next step is to unpack the needs assessment and costing exercise prepared by the G20 HLIP and deepen the analysis of gaps. Financing is key for better preparedness, but strong preparedness also requires sustained political will. This would seem to require a set of globally agreed norms and standards on pandemic preparednessbuilding on the Joint External Evaluation Tool-and regular monitoring and assessment of performance against those standards. Perhaps it is time to consider a new global compact on pandemic preparedness, similar to the one for climate, to ensure shared commitment and collective accountability around pandemic preparedness.
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Preparing for the next pandemic: What will it take? - World Bank Blogs
The global economy is beginning to bounce back from the economic ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, with growth of 5.6 percent expected for 2021. But this recovery is not being experienced equally. Poorer countries are contending with a deeper, longer-lasting crisis that has increased global poverty and is reversing recent trends of shrinking inequality.
The result is that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is largest for the worlds poorest. In 2021, the average incomes of people in the bottom 40 percent of the global income distribution are 6.7 percent lower than pre-pandemic projections, while those of people in the top 40 percent are down 2.8 percent. The reason for this large difference: The poorest 40 percent have not started to recover their income losses, while the top 40 percent has recovered more than 45 percent of their initial income losses. Between 2019 and 2021, the average income of the bottom 40 percent fell by 2.2 percent, while the average income of the top 40 percent fell by 0.5 percent.
The decline in income has translated into a sharp increase in global poverty. About 97 million more people are living on less than $1.90 a day because of the pandemic, increasing the global poverty rate from 7.8 to 9.1 percent; 163 million more are living on less than $5.50 a day. Globally, three to four years of progress toward ending extreme poverty are estimated to have been lost.
The number of poor people has increased across all regions, and particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. For example, high-frequency phone surveys conducted by the World Bank found that 81 percent of households in Peru and 85 percent of households in Senegal reported income losses in the first months of the pandemic. Extreme poverty in low-income countries has rapidly increased, setting back progress by eight to nine years, while progress in upper-middle-income countries has been set back by five to six years.
The poorest arent the only ones affected as households in the bottom 60 percent of the global income distribution have lost ground due to the pandemic. Pre-COVID-19 projections estimated that the daily per capita incomes of households in the middle of the global income distribution would grow from $7.15 in 2019 to $7.44 in 2021. Income for these households is now projected to be $7.05 in 2021, down 5 percent from the pre-pandemic estimates.
The diverging economic recovery means the COVID-19 crisis has directly offset declining inequality between countries. Now, between-country inequality is estimated to increase for the first time in a generation.
Emerging evidence shows that within countries, inequality may also have worsened. The World Banks phone surveys in developing economies showed that poorer households lost incomes and jobs at slightly higher rates than richer households, a trend that contributes to the worsening of global poverty and inequality. Thats because vulnerable groups women, those with low education, and those informally employed in urban areas were hit particularly hard.
It is not possible to quantify the effect on global inequality yet, but simulations suggest that an increase of just 1% in within-country inequality would result in 32 million people living on less than $1.90 a day in 2021 and increase the gap between the income growth of the bottom and top 40 percent to 4 percent from 2.7 percent with no change in within-country inequality.
The ravages of COVID-19 will also affect inequality and social mobility in the long run. Those who lost income due to the pandemic have been almost twice as likely to spend down assets or savings, leaving them less able to cope with continued or recurrent income losses. They have also been 57 percent more likely to go a full day without eating, which carries serious long-term consequences for cognitive and physical development when experienced among children. It is also estimated that COVID-19 could lead to an aggregate loss of between 0.3 and 0.9 years of schooling, with poorer families the most impacted.
Job losses among the most vulnerable workers, including women, youth, and those without college education, can affect their productivity and income growth even as economies revive. In addition, the severe impacts seen for small and micro enterprises can lead to the erosion of entrepreneurial capital and jobs that can be hard to reverse. Thats perhaps why, in economies where policies were becoming less restrictive and jobs were coming back between July 2020 and January 2021, the employment gaps between groups produced by the initial impacts of the pandemic did not narrow significantly.
Tackling increases in inequality and global poverty needs to start by accelerating the economic recovery in low- and lower-middle income countries. That means increasing the supply of COVID-19 vaccines to these countries, as their current low vaccination rates are an obstacle to growth. Additionally, increasing fiscal space, such as through the IDA20 replenishment, and fair and efficient domestic resource mobilization will be needed to support investments required for inclusive growth.
To ensure that the recovery is equitable and benefits all groups within countries, spending and policies that target women, low-skilled workers and urban informal sector workers are necessary. This includes providing equal access to financial services and technology and investing in safety nets and social insurance. In addition, children and parents need to be supported through policies as schools reopen.
Making our societies resilient to future crises requires taking on structural inequalities today.
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COVID-19 leaves a legacy of rising poverty and widening inequality
Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is still recovering from disruptions in lives and welfare that were unprecedented in recent times. In 2020, global poverty increased for the first time since 1998 and likely has not returned to pre-pandemic levels yet. Global supply-chain disruptions and containment measures including lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing resulted in steep job losses, and recovery has been hindered by the energy and food price crises, climate shocks, and the war in Ukraine. But how has the welfare of households evolved after the initial COVID-19 shock?
A recent paper sheds light on the topic. The analysis was based on more than 300 high-frequency phone surveys (HFPS) in 80 countries during 2020 and 2021 representing a universe of over 2.5 billion people. It focused on the scarring effects of the initial losses of employment and income by documenting patterns of recovery within and across countries, as restrictions on mobility were gradually relaxed.
The main conclusion of the paper is that, unless proper remediation takes place in a timely way, the uneven impacts associated with COVID-19 on welfare may be amplified over the medium to long term, leading to future increases in global poverty and inequality. The statement is supported by four findings:
First, female, informal, and less-educated workers stopped working to a greater degree initially and they have recovered employment at a slower pace.
Women were less likely to gain or recover employment during 2020 and 2021, especially when there were young children in the household. This is in part because stay-at-home measures had a stronger effect on employment for women relative to men. We estimate that less educated women with children were between 14 and 17 percentage points more likely to have stopped working and 19 percentage points less likely to have returned to work compared to more educated men with children.
The employment gap along the dimensions of gender and education grew wider as the pandemic evolved, accentuated by the burden of childcare on women. This is especially worrisome because in countries with higher pre-pandemic income inequality, women and lower-educated workers were more likely to lose jobs than their counterparts (Figure 1), which points to a vicious circle from higher inequality to more unequal impacts to, potentially, more inequality in the future.
Second, new jobs started in the aftermath of the pandemic tend to be of lower quality.
Simply looking at employment levels may not represent the full picture, as it misses the pandemic-induced changes in the number of hours worked or wage rates. The surveys reveal substantial job market churning, including transitions across sectors and employment types. Across sectors, the most common transition was into agriculture, which likely helped absorb the labor market shock but where earnings are lower. There was also an increase in self-employment. Workers were twice as likely to transition from wage work before the pandemic into self-employment in 2021 compared to the opposite transition (figure 1). Self-employment is typically associated with lower earnings and higher income volatility. These trends toward lower-quality employment are most prominent among lower-income countries and lower-educated workers, which could exacerbate existing inequalities over time.
Third, income losses were more extensive than job losses and led to heightened food insecurity and negative coping strategies in places where safety nets were inadequate.
Early in the pandemic, as many as two-thirds of households reported income losses levels much higher than the share of households reporting job losses. Many countries provided additional social assistance during the pandemic, but support coverage was often incomplete or delayed, particularly in the poorest countries.
The extent of unmitigated losses is evident from the sizable share of households that faced food insecurity. One out of six households surveyed early in the pandemic reported that adults in the household had gone at least a day without eating in the previous 30 days. This ratio decreased only slightly, to one of seven households in 2021 surveys.
The situation likely deteriorated during the pandemic and was not just a continuation of pre-existing trends. The sale of assets during the pandemic was particularly common among households with lower access to education and in rural areas. Even the temporary adoption of such negative coping mechanisms can have longer term implications as they could represent damages to human and physical capital, reducing the productive capacity of the poor. Unmitigated losses could lead to heightened future poverty and inequality.
Finally, learning inequalities were accentuated by school closures, with possible long-term impacts on families welfare.
Over 20 percent of students in low-income and lower-middle-income countries had not returned to school in 2021. Children were less likely to access education if household adults had lower levels of education (Figure 3). As we show, these same households were more vulnerable to welfare losses during the COVID-19 economic crisis, consistent with negative feedback loops across generations that may worsen future inequalities.
Figure 3. Children in households with lower education were less likely to return to school
If not properly addressed, losses in welfare from the COVID-19 crisis could worsen inequality in the longer term, but there is still the opportunity to mitigate this risk before it is realized.
As the recent Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report argues, targeted social protection, inclusive labor market policies, and sustained efforts to recover lost learning have potential to help offset the uneven impacts of the pandemic and offer a path to income recovery. Based on what we all learned from the pandemic, governments should prepare finance and invest in support delivery systems to protect vulnerable households from future crises that threaten to lock in higher levels of inequality.
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The people hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis now face the steepest ...
Note: A more recently updated version of the numbers and chart below is available here.
As the new year brings some hope for the fight against COVID-19, we are looking back and taking stock of the effect of the pandemic on poverty in 2020. In October 2020, using the June vintage of growth forecasts from the Global Economic Prospects, we estimated that between 88 and 115 million people around the globe would be pushed into extreme poverty in 2020. Using the January 2021 forecasts from GEP, we now expect the COVID-19-induced new poor in 2020 to rise to between 119 and 124 million. This range of estimates is in line with other estimates based on alternative recent growth forecasts.
As in our earlier estimates, the number of COVID-19-induced new poor is calculated as the difference between poverty projected with the pandemic and poverty projected without the pandemic. To predict poverty in the former we use the GEP growth forecasts from January 2021, and for the pandemic free world, we use GEP growth forecasts made in January 2020.[1] It is important to note that while we are now looking back at 2020, our estimates are still relying on extrapolations of household surveys that pre-date 2020.
The estimated increase in global poverty in 2020 is truly unprecedented. Figure 1 shows the annual change in the number of global extreme poor from 1992 to 2020. Each bar represents the net number of people who have either moved out of extreme poverty if they were poor in the last year or moved into extreme poverty if they were not poor in the previous year. Before COVID-19, the only other crisis-induced increase in the global number of poor in the past three decades was the Asian financial crisis, which increased extreme poverty by 18 million in 1997 and by another 47 million in 1998. In the two-decades since 1999, the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide has fallen by more than 1 billion people. Part of this success in reducing poverty is set to be reversed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in 20 years, poverty is likely to significantly increase. The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to increase extreme poverty by between 88 million (baseline estimate) and 93 million (downside estimate) in 2020. Considering those who would have otherwise escaped extreme poverty but will not due to the pandemic (i.e. 31 million in 2020), the total COVID-19-induced new poor in 2020 is estimated to be between 119 and 124 million.
Utilizing various growth forecasts that have been available in 2020, Figure 2 shows both the change in the estimated number of COVID-19-induced new poor in 2020 and the contributions of various regions. The worsening impact of the pandemic has drastically changed our projections over the course of this year, especially when comparing with the April growth rates (while the increase from June to January GEP is smaller). This has been driven primarily by a worsening forecast for South Asia, which has also changed the regional profile of the COVID-19-induced new poor. It is important to note that the poverty estimate in South Asia in recent years, even before the pandemic, is subject to considerable uncertainty due to the absence of new household survey data for India since 2011/12.[2]
Using the growth forecast from April 2020 under the $1.90-a-day poverty line, we estimated that 62 million would fall into extreme poverty globally in 2020, with South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa each contributing roughly two-fifths. We revised the global estimate to between 88 and 115 million using the June-2020 growth forecast, with about half of the new poor residing in South Asia. Using the January 2021forecast, we now estimate between 119 and 124 additional poor globally with around 60% living in South Asia.
The increase in the number of poor is also visible at the $3.20 poverty line. At the $3.20 line, the global new poor using the GEP-baseline scenarios has increased from 175 million to 228 million (from June 2020 to January 2021), again driven by South Asia. At the $5.50 line, we do not find a worsening of the global estimate, as our new estimates actually lie within the range we estimated using the June GEP. This is largely explained by a better than expected outlook for East Asia and Pacific, counteracting the upward revision in South Asia.
There is little doubt that 2020 has been an exceptionally difficult year in recent history. While there has been progress in the development of vaccines, it doesn't appear that the increase in poverty of this past year will be reversed in 2021. Figure 3 presents the nowcast of poverty up to 2021 using the pre-COVID-19 and the COVID-19 baseline and downside scenarios using the GEP January 2021 forecast. As reported above, the pandemic-induced global new poor is estimated to be between 119 and 124 million in 2020. In 2021, the estimated COVID-19-induced poor is set to rise to between 143 and 163 million. While the estimates for 2021 are very preliminary, it goes to show that for millions of people around the globe this crisis will not be short-lived. Following the Asian financial crisis (see Figure 1), 42 million people moved out of extreme poverty in 1999 and, on average, 54 million people have moved out of extreme poverty annually in the two decades before the pandemic. We hope that when we finally take stock of 2021 in a years time, the coming year will have fared much better for poverty reduction than what we expect at the start of the year. However, the continued worsening of growth outlooks that we observed in the past year could suggest otherwise. Increasing inequality is another downside risk that we have not explored here (we have assumed that inequality remains unchanged), but discussed in more detail elsewhere. Perhaps the only certainty in this crisis is that it is truly unprecedented in modern history.
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UK government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Programme.
[1] As before, we use a 0.85 global pass-through to adjust the growth rates for the projected years, i.e. 2019-2021 (for details on the pass-through calculation see Lakner et al. 2020). We use the most recent January-2021 GEP forecast for all scenarios in 2019.
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Updated estimates of the impact of COVID-19 on global poverty: Looking ...
Governments across the globe will spend about $5 trillion on K-12 education this year. But unless they get all children and young people back to school, keep them in class, and recover the central elements of learning, this generation could lose twice or three times that amount in earning losses.
The first impact was the millions of lives lost due to the disease caused by the COVID 19 virus. The second was the human suffering caused by job instability and poverty. The third is on children and youth who should have been in school but were told to stay at home.
It is two years since the pandemic started. Nearly all countries decided that one of the main ways to fight the pandemic was to keep students out of school and universities. Public health experts had decided that keeping education institutions open would lead to further spread of the virus. To flatten the curve and prevent overcrowding of hospitals, kids would have to stay home.
Many European and some East Asian countries reopened school relatively quickly, conscious of both the obvious costs for kids and the scant evidence of the benefits of the complete closure. But in many countries in South Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and even in East Asia, school closures were maintained for exceptionally long periods. Our own countries, India and Peru, are tragically representative.
By the end of 2021, school days lost were well above two hundredthats about a school year and a half. This prolonged interruption in learning could have grave long lasting effects, particularly in middle income and poor countries.
Most of the impact will be on children and youth who happened to be between 4 and 25 years old in 2020 and 2021, generating a huge intergenerational inequality. Being out of school for that long means that children not just stop learning, they also tend to forget a lot of what they have learned. In late 2020, the World Bank estimated that a 7-month absence from schools would increase the share of students in learning poverty from 53 to 63 percent. An additional 7 million students would drop out of school. The effects on marginalized minorities and girls will be even worse. Our loss estimates have been revised upwards, and now we expect that, unless swift and bold action is taken, learning poverty can reach 70%.
Biggest losses for those with the least
In all countriesrich, middle-income and poorkids from the poorest families are bearing the largest losses as their opportunities to maintain any educational engagement through remote learning are limited. Internet access for them is poor: only half of all students in middle income countries and just a tenth in the poorest countries have web access. The use of TV and radio and facilitating learning materials has helped, but it cannot replace interactive education. Learning cannot just mean watching television or listening to the radio for a few hours a day.
The result is a widening of the already large inequality of opportunity. In the developing world, COVID-19 might lead to lower growth, higher poverty and more inequality for a generation, a terrible triple threat to global prosperity for decades to come.
By late last year, we had hard data about learning losses in middle-income countries like Brazil and India. In the state of So Paulo, for example, educators decided to measure the status of learning continuouslyas opposed to many countries who have postponed any type of learning measurement, maybe to avoid getting bad news. They find that after a year without in-person classes, students had learned 27 percent less what they would have learned in normal times. Indias Pratham, a well-regarded education NGO, has found that minimum proficiency levels have been cut by half in the state of Karnataka.
Three new "Rs" for a novel coronavirus
Encouragingly, by the end of 2021, schools had reopened in many countries. But nearly one in four education systems were still closed and many systems had reopened only partially. 1.5 billion children were back in class, though 300 million kids still need to be brought back to school safely. But that was before the Omicron variant of the virus. These numbers have changed since the start of this year.
We think a blend of reopened schools, remote learning and remedial programs can limit the damage caused by the disruptions and serve as a model response for future shocksand maybe even make public education better than it was a couple of years ago.
Reopen schools safely. If youre unsettled by the image of millions of kids sitting and staring at the TV, consider this: more than half the households in 30 African countries dont even have electricity. For just too many children in the world, conditions at home are not conducive for learning, too many do not have Internet access, a decent device, or money to pay for data or books, and a space to study at home. And education is inherently a social endeavor: it requires incessant interaction. This means brick-and-mortar schools, which must open and be made safe for students and teachers. Investments are needed. Quite often there is money available for this and there is no dearth of guidelines from international agencies on how to reopen schools safely. What is generally missing in many countries is a national sense of urgency.
Invest in remote learning. World Bank and OECD teams completed an assessment of remote learning during the two years of the pandemic. The results are not always encouraging. But the pandemic showed that hybrid learning innovations -combining in-person and remote instruction through smart use of digital technologies are here to stay. But investments in technology have to be cleverly coupled with investments in learning skills. The pandemic has quickened a change in mindset about the use of technology, and we have a small window of opportunity to get teachers and administrators to see technology as part of the learning process. Besides, this is not the last pandemic or natural disaster that might force schools to close. By facilitating the continuation of the learning process at home, better learning technologies in the classroom can also make the system more effective both when schools are open and when they have to be closed.
Remediate to recoup missed and lost learning. In the United States, students returned last Fall with about a third less learning in reading during the 2019-20 academic year than they normally would have. In many countries with long school closures, students are attending a grade without having grasped even a small portion of what was taught in the previous grade. If kids dont catch up, particularly those in the early grades where losses are larger, they might eventually even drop out. Across the world, schools must adapt to the needs of studentsboth the fundamental skills of literacy and numeracy, and their mental health and well-being. Encouragingly, though, students who learned less last year tend to rebound faster than othersif they are provided access to remedial instruction. But this cannot be done without additional support to teachers and principals.
Averting a permanent loss
To help in these efforts, the World Bank Group is working on nearly a hundred COVID-related education projects in more than 60countries. These projects sum upto $ 11 billion. These are record numbers for the World Bank, buta fraction of the $72 billion the US federal government is making available for public schools to reopen safely. We are supporting countries as diverse as Chile, Jordan and Pakistan. More efforts are needed to finance the return to classroom-based teaching, and help public schools adopt teaching techniques that blend on-line and in-classroom learning and teach students at the level they need today after the months and years they have been denied of an education, focusing on foundation skills and in their emotional wellbeing
The future of a billion kids around the world is at risk. Unless we get them back in school again and find ways to remedy the effects of the interruption, COVID-19 will result in a huge setback for this generation. When the fallout of the coronavirus is finally tallied, it will become clear that its biggest damage is the lost learning of school-goers.
A decade from now, we may look back and find that the biggest permanent loss of this pandemic was avoidable. We can act now and avoid the regret.
Note: A version of this blog was first published on the Future Development Blog of the Brookings Institution on January 28th, 2022.
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We are losing a generation: The devastating impacts of COVID-19
Images of Earth taken at night are revolutionizing our ability to measure and understand nearly every dimension of human activity on Earth and allow us to get a glimpse into human-Earth interactions in close to real time. The COVID-19 outbreak exemplifies how nighttime lights can help understand the impacts of shocks on populations, economies, and markets.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of remote sensingbased socioeconomic research, a Special Issue of Remote Sensing will bring together original and novel studies demonstrating innovative applications of analyses based on nighttime lights, to help broaden our understanding of human activity, how its changing, and a wide range of implications.
Seeing the Impacts of COVID-19 at Night
In mid-December 2019, COVID-19 began emerging in Wuhan, China, and rapidly spread, causing significant impacts not only on peoples health, but on the entire economy, the job market and the daily life across the country. Within several weeks the disease was spreading globally, with millions of confirmed cases recorded around the world and significant implications for the global economy.
The need to track and predict outbreaks, as well as understand the impacts of COVID-19 on economies, has led to the utilization of unique sources of data that could help track the spread of the pandemic in close to real time. Satellite observations - including those taken at night - are becoming a primary source of data for tracking the progress of the pandemic and its impacts on energy consumption, transportation, social interactions, the functionality of critical infrastructure, tourism, trade emissions, etc. These images provide a compelling and striking picture of the large-scale impacts of COVID-19 on Earth, from the impacts of the pandemic on businesses and transportation networks to monitoring the gradual recovery of cities around the world.
The idea of using nighttime lights to understand pandemics is not new, and previous studies have already shown, for example, how nighttime lights can be used to estimate seasonal measles epidemics, which are directly linked to spatio-temporal changes in population density as measured by anthropogenic light emissions.
Changes in the intensity of nighttime lights can be used to illustrate pace of recovery. These images show changes in nighttime lights between March 2020 and February 2020. Cyan = lighting brightened, Red = lighting dimmed.Source: Elvidge et al., 2020. The Payne Institute for Public Policy.
Shedding Light on Earth
The use of nighttime lights observations to monitor pandemics is only one example of how satellite observations can be used to help us better understand processes on Earth. Since the early 1990s, with the launch of DMSP-OLS, remotely sensed observations of nighttime lights have been a key instrument for understanding almost every aspect of human activity on Earth, particularly in the data-scarce region, without needing to be filtered through national data agencies.
Today, newer sensors, such as VIIRS/DNB, provide nighttime light data at an even higher spatial resolution and granularity. With advances in the availability and the quality of nighttime light data, together with improvements in data storage capabilities and the development of new analytical methods and workflows for analyzing the data, there is an ongoing increase in the number of scientific applications that exploit remotely sensed nighttime lights to measure our world.
Nighttime lights observations or measurements of the intensity of light emitted from Earth at night - provide a unique glimpse into human behavior and socioeconomic patterns as well as into the nature of human-Earth interactions. These observations are especially vital in countries where timely, accurate, and reliable statistical or administrative data is poor. Here, nighttime light measurements can provide important insights into where people are and how they move; they can also help us understand patterns of economic development or evaluate the economic impacts of investments in infrastructure.
While in some cases, nighttime light observations may carry inherent measurement errors especially when compared across space and time, there is a general consensus that nighttime lights are able to represent many dimensions of human presence and activity on Earth.
Today, nighttime lights are being used to measure the extent and characteristics of urbanization processes; estimate economic growth at both national and subnational levels; map global poverty as well as population density, migration and mobility patterns; track local household wealth, education and health; understand armed conflicts; measure access to electricity and electrification as well as community resilience, fishing activity, coral reef health, and more. Recently, researchers have also shown that nighttime lights can even help explain brain development and human behavior.
Moreover, by looking at the relation between the distribution of the population on Earth and the occurrence of different types of hazards, nighttime lights measurements can be used to evaluate how humans adapt and respond to these hazards. This makes them useful as an instrument to guide resilience planning. For example, the City Resilience Program utilizes nighttime light data in its City Scan product to highlight where hotspots of economic activity may be developing in flood-prone areas.
The City Resilience Program incorporates nighttime light data in its City Scan product to highlight where hotspots of economic activity may be developing in flood-prone areas. The map on the left illustrates the cumulative area flooded since 2015. The map on the right illustrates the relative change in the intensity of nighttime lights as a proxy for identifying accelerating economic activity since 2013.
While COVID-19 is creating a new demand for what these observations can tell us, the insights they enable will also be important inputs into many aspects of countries recovery when the health emergency subsides.
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Nighttime lights are revolutionizing the way we understand COVID-19 and ...
