- The pandemic has exacerbated the challenges facing fragile and conflict-affected states, such as climate change, food inflation and gender inequality.
- IMF projections show that per capita incomes in fragile states won’t recover to near their 2019 levels until at least 2024.
Even before the pandemic, fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS) already confronted some of the greatest challenges among the world’s economies. While not all FCS face active conflict, most are at risk: global levels of violence are at a 30-year high and more than 80 million people had been forcefully displaced prior to the discovery of the coronavirus.
Now, the continuing pandemic poses a significant risk that the divergence between these countries and the rest of the world will widen—and persist.
The chart of the week illustrates how the pandemic exacerbated income divergence between these economies and the…
