According to the latest projections released by the IMF, global economic activity will surpass pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021, with world GDP growing by 5.5 per cent. The forecast has been revised positively, in light of expectations that vaccines would remove current restrictions in the second half of the year.
However, projections are heterogeneous across world regions, owing to the differences in the access to healthcare, the effectiveness of relief measures, the exposure to cross-country spillovers, and structural characteristics. Furthermore, large uncertainty still surrounds the evolution of the epidemic, reflecting new waves of contagion, new variants of the virus and the distribution of vaccines.