Property Rights Alliance congratulates the Center For Indonesian Policy Studies (CIPS) on becoming a finalist in the final round for the Templeton Freedom Award, a prestigious honor complementing the work CIPS has done through their Affordable Food for the Poor Initiative, making nutritious food available and affordable throughout Indonesia. With many barriers and import restrictions affecting food in Indonesia, CIPS has worked relentlessly, against popular opinion, to promote open markets and food security throughout Indonesia.

Pakistan’s has exhibited a commendable economic recovery from the recession that resulted due to measures taken to deal with Covid-19 outbreak. Not only has the country made a recovery but economic prosperity, as calculated by the Pakistan Prosperity Report, has also has registered a new high, since the base period of June 2019.

No world leader could have welcomed the global coronavirus pandemic more than embattled Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, for whom the crisis was, ironically, a lifeline amid political turmoil. Since October 2019, Chile has been rocked by enormous protests of citizens demanding a new constitution. Those protests paralyzed the economy and put President Pinera’s right-wing coalition in the vexing position of acceding to a constitutional plebiscite while also opposing the constitution’s replacement. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic offered him an opportunity to flex his technocratic and managerial skills, demonstrate leadership, and distract from the unrest.

Forecasting during a strong shock is burdened with exceptionally high uncertainty. This gives rise to the temptation to formulate alarmist forecasts. Experiences from earlier pandemics, particularly those from the 20th century, for which we have the most data, don’t provide a basis for this. The mildest of them weakened growth by less than 1 percentage point, and the worst, the Spanish Flu, by 6 percentage points. Still, even the Spanish Flu never caused losses on the order of 20% of GDP – not even where it turned out to be a humanitarian disaster, costing the lives of 3-5% of the population. History suggests that if pandemics lead to such deep losses at all, it’s only in particular quarters and not over a whole year, as economic activity rebounds. The strength of that rebound is largely determined by economic policy. The purpose of this work is to describe possible scenarios for a rebound in Polish economic growth after the epidemic.