(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)
Mejía-Mantilla, Carolina; Olivieri, Sergio; Rivadeneira, Ana; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Romero, Javier
Latin American and the Caribbean is one
of the regions in the world most affected by the COVID-19
pandemic, and the welfare impacts for households have been
severe. At the macroeconomic level, the World Bank estimates
a contraction of 6.9 percent of the region’s GDP in 2020,
due to pandemic-control measures and the deceleration of the
global economy (World Bank, 2021). Regional export prices
significantly dropped in the first semester of 2020 (5.2
percent) (Inter-American Development Bank, 2020), and
although they began to recover in the second half of the
year, the volume of goods-exports dropped by 8 points by the
third quarter of 2020 (World Bank, 2021).