COVID-19 is a humanitarian crisis on a global scale. The virus continues to spread throughout the globe, placing health systems under unprecedented stress in the battle to save lives. The human scale of this tragedy is set to worsen as the virus spreads tolower income countries with weaker healthcare systems. In the March 2020 OECD Interim Economic Outlook, the downside scenario saw global growth halved to 1.5%. That was optimistic. The most recent estimates in the June 10 OECD Economic Outlook suggest anunprecedented collapse in the first half of 2020 –an almost 13% decline in global GDP (Figure 1).Moreover, the costs to the global economy from support packages, through central banks and fiscal actions, are very significant and likely to have long-lasting and complex effects on management of sovereign and corporate debt. Yet notwithstanding these efforts, most major economies now look set to enter recession, and more serious scenarios cannot be discounted
