Vaccine policy will be most important than all other economic policies in the year 2021 as the world is trying to recover from the pandemic crisis, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva said on Wednesday.
“Vaccine policy this year, probably next year, is going to be the most important economic policy, may beat even monetary and fiscal policy in terms of significance,” Georgieva told.
She said that a prerequisite to bring the world to a sustainable level of economic growth everywhere is vaccinating all people.
The International Monetary Fund in its remark in April said that the end of the coronavirus crisis was increasingly visible. At the time, IMF raised its economic predictions for the global economy on the basis of higher vaccination rates and ongoing fiscal and monetary stimulus.
As a result, the IMF predicted global GDP growth of 6% for the current year, and of 4.4% for next year. But, these forecasts are largely dependent on how vaccination drives evolve, including in low-income countries.
The IMF suggested in the previous month that an additional investment of $50 billion should be spent for ensuring a faster rollout of vaccination rates, saying it can ultimately lead to returns of $9 trillion for the worldwide economy.
IMF Chief Georgieva on Wednesday again reiterated that this plan is “the best return on investment in our lifetimes.”
“Having a vaccination card that shows when you were vaccinated is a very useful tool. It is already being applied. I do believe that we need to look into applying that more broadly,” Georgieva said.
