Extreme poverty is set to rise for the first time in more than two decades, and persistent output losses imply a major setback to living standards versus the pre-pandemic days, the IMF said.“The poor are getting poorer with close to 90 million people expected to fall into extreme deprivation this year,” said Gopinath.

The world’s richest countries have locked up most of the world’s potential vaccine supply through 2021, raising worries that poor and vulnerable communities will not be able to get the shots. Meanwhile, an ambitious international project to deliver coronavirus vaccines to the world’s poorest people, called Covax, is facing potential shortages of money, cargo planes, refrigeration and vaccines themselves.

Most European governments eased lockdowns over the summer to start reviving economies already battered by the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the return of normal activity – from packed restaurants to new university terms – fuelled a sharp spike in cases all over the continent.

Gopinath said for emerging market and developing countries, excluding China, IMF has a downgrade with growth projected to be – 5.7 percent in 2020 and then a recovery to 5 percent in 2021.

With this, the cumulative growth in per capita income for emerging-market and developing economies, excluding China, over 2020-21 is projected to be lower than that for advanced economies, she said.

Gopinath said that the considerable global fiscal support of close to $12 trillion and the extensive rate cuts, liquidity injections, and asset purchases by central banks helped save lives and livelihoods and prevented a financial catastrophe.