IMF estimates the depth of Russia's economic decline in a pandemic
Russian GDP to shrink by 5.5%, the global GDP to drop by 3%
Alyona Yakushova
The International Monetary Fund published its forecast for the situation in the global economy amid pandemic coronavirus. Instead of the expected in January growth of global GDP by 3.3% in 2020, the IMF now predicts a 3% decline and global trade will sag by 11%. Next year the global economy will grow by 5.8% of GDP instead of 3.4% according to the January forecast.
The world has changed dramatically in the past three months, according to the IMF report. The impact of the pandemic coronavirus on the global economy was estimated in the previous, January, version of the forecast, but no one then did not understand the extent of the impending disaster, analysts explain. It is likely that the world economy this year will experience its worst recession since the Great Depression and it certainly will be larger than the one during the financial crisis 10 years ago, the report said.
The hardest hit by the pandemic measures will be Italy's economy - its GDP will shrink by 9.3 percent after growing 0.3 percent last year. Also seriously affected by the coronavirus, Spain's economy will shrink, according to the IMF forecast, by 8%. Germany, France and Great Britain will see their economies contract. The U.S. economy, according to the IMF calculations, will lose 5.9% of GDP, though in January it was forecasted to grow by 2%. In general, the developed economies are waiting for a 6.1% decline this year and growth of 4.5% next year, according to a report of the IMF.
Economists urged authorities to allocate 5-10% of GDP to fight crisis
The only drivers of global growth will remain China and India, but growth forecasts for these countries have been radically downgraded. The Chinese economy will grow by 1.2% instead of the expected 6%, and the Indian economy, by 1.9% instead of 5%.
According to the IMF forecast, the Russian economy will shrink by 5.5% in 2020 after growing by 1.3% last year. At the same time, the Fund does not expect a surge of unemployment in Russia - it will grow from 4.6% in 2019 to 4.9% in 2020. As early as next year, economic growth in Russia will resume at 3.5%, which is 1.5 percentage points higher than the fund's previous forecast.
The IMF forecast for Russia is close to the estimates given by the chairman of the Accounts Chamber Alexei Kudrin. According to him, by the end of 2020, the Russian economy will shrink by 3-5%, while according to the pessimistic scenario - by 8%. Central Bank Chairman Elvira Nabiullina also said last week that the decline was inevitable, although she did not quote any figures. The Ministry of Economic Development has postponed the publication of the official forecast for 2020 because of the need to further assess the situation.
The economists at the Liberal Mission Foundation (Natalia Akindinova, Sergei Aleksashenko, Konstantin Sonin, Oleg Vyugin, and others) predict a 3.7% to 8.6% decline in the Russian economy by 2020. According to these experts, the government must at least double its expenditures for the support of the population and business, and possibly increase them to the level of developed countries - 9-10% of GDP.
Users of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp have reported disruptions in the work of social networks and messengers, according to data from the Downdetector portal.
Thus, the failure in the social network Facebook received several thousand complaints from the U.S. alone, most of which concerned the inability to open the site. At the same time about the problems with the work of the site and other services users from many countries, including Russia.
Facebook has already said it is aware of the problems with the company-owned services. "We are aware of the fact that some people are having trouble connecting to our apps and products. We're working to rectify the situation as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused," the company said in a statement on Twitter.
We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.
The last global outage of Facebook and its services took place on October 4. The social network and messenger with the same name, Instagram and Whatsapp were unavailable for several hours. During that time, Telegram, as stated by the founder of the messenger, Pavel Durov, was able to attract more than 70 million new users. The messenger Signal also reported a sharp increase in the number of new users during the disruption.
October 5, Facebook reported in his blog that the global failure in its work has been caused by changes in the configuration of the backbone routers: engineers have failed to change the configuration of routers, which distribute traffic between data centers of Facebook, which led to a break in communication, which "had a domino effect on the communication between the data centers. Moreover, the failure
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