Seizing the Opportunity for a Pro-Growth, Post-Pandemic World

Toward a brighter future

Using this moment for some of these difficult reforms means that the monetary and fiscal stimulus still flowing will serve as a springboard to a brighter and more sustainable future rather than a crutch to a weaker version of the pre-COVID-19 economy. Seizing the opportunity could deliver years of solid post-COVID-19 growth and progress in living standards. The IMF estimates that comprehensive growth-enhancing reforms cutting across product, labor, and financial markets could raise annual growth in GDP per capita by over one percentage point in emerging market and developing economies in the next decade. These countries would be able to double their speed of convergence to advanced economies’ living standards relative to the pre-pandemic years.

That’s where we’ve come from, but where are we headed? In the year ahead, as more vaccines roll off the production line, more people get jabbed, and more economies gradually reopen, policymakers need to engineer a fundamental shift from saving their economies from collapse, to strengthening their economies for the future with growth-oriented reforms.

It doesn’t all have to be done at once. Recovery from this crisis will take years for most countries. Inspiring the next generation to rebuild a brighter future is the primary challenge for this generation of policymakers. They should seize this challenge, daring to be bold as the current crisis reaches a crossroads. Pairing growth reforms with recovery spending will deliver the prosperity that we have promised our citizens, making our own fate in a post-COVID-19 world.

https://blogs.imf.org/2021/07/20/seizing-the-opportunity-for-a-pro-growth-post-pandemic-world/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

Citation:  IMF

How Platforms Can Offer a “Better Deal” to Their Workers

As the world begins to build back, the diversity and flexibility of platform work will have an essential role to ensure a green, sustainable and full economic recovery, in Europe and throughout the world. It is essential to strike a balance between the flexibility that platform workers deserve and job creation, innovation, growth and access to social protections.

https://www.oecd-forum.org/posts/how-platforms-can-offer-a-better-deal-to-their-workers?utm_source=newsletter_mailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

How the private sector can advance development

Unlike the MDGs, achieving this new set of ambitious goals calls for bolder action from diverse actors across society, whose collective efforts outweigh what they could deliver individually. And the private sector is not least among these actors. Why? Business-led initiatives, such as research and development partnerships, knowledge-sharing platforms, technology and skills transfer, and infrastructure investment have the potential to kick-start development, enable productivity gains, generate better quality jobs, strengthen skills and promote technological advances.

Still, the private sector is often an agent of change and a potential partner for implementing the SDGs. While doing no harm and minimising risk of adverse impacts remain priorities, business strategies can align around the SDGs and galvanise action for development. Evidence from Asia, Latin America and Africa shows how private sector contributions not only stimulate economic growth but also can help implement the SDG agenda.

https://oecd-development-matters.org/2015/10/06/how-the-private-sector-can-advance-development/

The 21st-Century Employer Must Be a Steward of Public Health

 COVID-19 has spotlighted even more starkly the profoundly powerful link between public health and economic viability. Our new report, Employers’ Role in the COVID-19 Environment: Winning in the Vastly Changed World of Work, highlights the unique convergence between the megatrend of aging and the COVID-19 pandemic in the workplace and offers insights to inform employers’ public health and workforce strategies at this intersection. It draws on over a decade of work to define considerations and best practices for employers’ role in healthy aging.

Chief among the report’s findings is the guidance to all employers “to elevate public health as a central feature of their culture and embed it into management”.

For employers, the pandemic increases the importance of understanding changes in the length and trajectory of careers, what flexibility regimens are emerging and, not incidentally, enabling the positive link between work and health. 

https://www.oecd-forum.org/posts/the-21st-century-employer-must-be-a-steward-of-public-health?utm_source=digest_mailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily_digest