SHOTLIST:
1. Various of IMF building
2. Various of industrial workers
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5. Various of automotive industry
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STORYLINE:
Accelerated vaccinations and a flood of government spending, especially in the United States, have boosted the outlook for the global economy, but more must be done to prevent permanent scars, the IMF said Tuesday.

The International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook now sees world growth of six percent this year after the contraction of 3.3 percent in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic – the worst peacetime downturn since the Great Depression a century before. Rapid government responses prevented a much worse outcome, a collapse that could have been "at least three times as large," IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath said.

The United States, which deployed another US $1.9 trillion last month, is expected to grow by 6.4 percent, among the fastest expansions in the world and 1.3 points higher than the January forecast. Meanwhile, China's economy, one of few that grew last year, will expand 8.4 percent in 2021, the IMF said. The Euro Area too will see GDP expand 4.4 percent, slightly better than the prior forecast.

The IMF also improved its outlook for Latin America in its report, though it warned that growth depended on the evolution of the pandemic. Predicting Brazil's GDP would rise 3.7 percent this year, officials forecast growth of 5.8 percent for Argentina – a rise of more than one percentage point.

Gopinath said that "even with high uncertainty about the path of the pandemic, a way out of this health and economic crisis is increasingly visible."

However, she stressed that the health crisis remains the critical factor in the economic recovery, and the slow rollout of vaccinations to many developing countries fuel risks not just of a worsening Covid-19 outbreak, but also a more troubling future for those nations and a widening gap with rich countries.

The IMF calculates that an additional 95 million people expected to have entered the ranks of the extreme poor in 2020, and there are 80 million more undernourished than before.