Mexico asks IMF, World Bank to help buttress middle-income countries against pandemic
Source: Xinhua | 2020-10-16
Mexico on Wednesday called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to establish a support strategy for middle-income countries, saying they have no financial wiggle room to tackle the economic fallout caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Countries such as Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Bulgaria cannot afford to take the kind of emergency financial measures that developed countries have adopted, Mexico's Finance Minister Arturo Herrera said.
"We do not have these margins of maneuver, neither social nor fiscal nor economic. Unlike them(richer countries), we do not do 'everything that is needed,' but (we do) what we can," Herrera said in a video posted on Twitter.
Herrera participated Wednesday morning in the virtual annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, which are usually held at their headquarters in Washington.
The central theme of this year's meetings focuses on the recovery of the global economy as the pandemic persists.
In its latest World Economic Report released Tuesday, the IMF projected that the global economy will contract 4.4 percent in 2020 and warned that a road out of the crisis will likely be "long, uneven and highly uncertain."
Busiunion
Busiunion