:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/ECAUH7ONF5BNHMWNMHKUMZGJA4.jpg "Latin America needs 0,000 Million to cover Health Costs")
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Globe Live Media, Friday, January 29, 2021
The president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Mauricio Claver-Carone, estimated this Friday that the Latin American and Caribbean region needs 150,000 million dollars only to cover health costs associated with the covid-19 pandemic.
At a table organized by the Globe Live Media Agency, and with the central question of how to ensure that Latin America has its own post-COVID-19 Marshall Plan in the same way that Europe has managed to approve its Next Generation Recovery Plan, he stressed that the impacts of the pandemic have been severe in the region.
With only 8% of the global population, a third of the deaths from covid-19 worldwide have occurred in the region and the economic consequences have been serious.
In addition, the pandemic has been joined by the worst hurricane season in 50 years in the region and the worst refugee crisis in the world, that of Venezuela, where the international community has only contributed a tenth of the resources compared to the similar Syrian crisis, has remarked.
Claver-Carone has indicated that two US senators presented a bipartisan proposal of historic recapitalization of 80,000 million dollars for the IDB, which would allow the record of almost 22,000 million that was set to the region in 2020 “to become the norm and not an anomaly in a crisis year.”
In his opinion, the normal average of 12 to 14 billion dollars would be clearly insufficient to cover the needs of the region.
On February 16, the IDB will launch a historic plan with the largest American and regional companies for a constant action plan to involve the private sector in this Marshall plan.
“We are facing two paths of two realities: the possibility of another lost decade with greater economic and social deterioration or of recovery, reinvestment and renewed opportunity.”
To choose the second path, the region requires additional sources and there are three key questions: how much is invested, where and how, he stressed, to add that the decade of recovery must be focused on five key areas to achieve the greatest impact, which are : regional integration, digital economy, SMEs, climate change and gender equality.