WASHINGTON - Governments are urged to prioritise spending on public health, social programmes, and education as part of their efforts to combat the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, said World Bank Group President David Malpass.
“We are encouraging spending in the first instance on health programmes, on social programmes, and on education. A critical step for countries is to reopen schools,” Mr Malpass said in a virtual press conference on the sidelines of the 2020 IMF-World Bank Group Annual Meetings, Wednesday (14/10).
“We think there are as many as a billion children still out of school in the developing world. And in those cases, learning goes backward, which has a huge future cost for countries.”
According to Mr Malpass, in the long term countries need to look at infrastructure development to boost growth, although there are present challenges including a low interest rate environment. In response, he added, infrastructure projects need to be well-documented and standardised.
“One of the challenges is we have a very low interest rate environment, and it should be an environment that provides much more infrastructure investment than is currently occurring. A key step in this is the documentation and the standardisation of the quality of the infrastructure projects,” he said. (MS)