-The Indian Express Women are bearing a disproportionate amount of the burden that the imposition of lockdowns, shrinking of economic opportunity has created. While much of COVID-19’s epidemiology remains shrouded in mystery, we know that it claims the lives of men more than women — at double the rate in some countries. Other coronavirus outbreaks, such as the 2003 SARS and 2012 MERS epidemics, were also more deadly for men than women. But...

-The Indian Express As we grapple with a health, economic and humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, the immediate need is to provide emergency relief to cushion the effects of the dual shocks of the virus and lockdown on informal workers. COVID-19 is causing havoc across the world, destroying both lives and livelihoods. developing countries such as India are particularly vulnerable as their vast informal workforce, which has no labour, social or health...

-The Hindu Business Line By blocking a proposal for the IMF to issue new Special Drawing Rights, the two have denied developing countries much-needed liquidity at a time of extreme economic distress At the recent G20 and IMF-WB Spring meetings held virtually in the third week of April 2020, a proposal for the IMF to issue an additional 500 billion of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) was blocked by the US and —...

-The Hindu The trend across developing countries is to give State governments as much discretion as possible India urgently needs to increase fiscal support for COVID-19 relief and rebuilding. Among comparable developing countries with similar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, India has spent the least as a share of its GDP. While the Central government has announced measures amounting to 0.8% of GDP, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that State-level relief...

-TheWire.in New Delhi shouldn’t ignore the interests of developing economies over worries that the funds may be used for ‘extraneous reasons’. The global economy is in the grip of an unprecedented crisis, once never experienced before in its history. The virus pandemic has yet to run its course in most countries, but meanwhile, the containment measures – which have involved major restrictions on mobility, gatherings and economic activity – have already imposed...