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The annual ‘Spring Meeting’ of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank has been organised and it focussed on vaccines, climate change, debt and recovery. David Malpass, President, World Bank at the start of the ‘Spring Meeting’ commented, “There is the good news that there is faster global growth driven primarily by the US, China, and India, having strong rebounds.” These are three major economies globally. The USA and China have been two superpowers and India has started to gain significance in the global picture as a fast growing economy. Amid pandemic these countries are trying to scale up their growth pace, holistically. 

Malpass has also expressed concerns over growing inequality due to the Covid-19 pandemic. He said, “But there’s also the concern that there’s inequality. Inequality in terms of vaccinations, in terms of median income that’s not going up very fast for some of the countries and may even be going down. There’s the interest rate differential, where poor countries face much higher interest rates and they haven’t gone down the way global interest rates have done.”

News agency PTI informed that Malpass also conveyed worries that there is an inequality in terms of the bankruptcy process – that is not available to sovereign countries. So the poorer countries do not have a way out of these very heavy debt burdens. He added, “There is also inequality in terms of access to credit with a lot of the stimulus going to the upper end, and people that do not have pristine credit ratings, for example, or small businesses, new entrants, women that would like to start a business, having great difficulty getting credit.”

According to Malpass, the World Bank and the IMF are working together thoroughly to implement the G20’s Common Framework successfully to deal with unsustainable debt situations. As he has mentioned, there was a call for the private sector to provide comparable treatment with regard to debt. Malpass further added, “I share that sentiment that Germany said today at the G20 that there may be a softening of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth forecast related to the vaccine problem, and it redoubles everyone’s urgency and efforts to have more vaccines available worldwide,”