Kunal Sen gives special lecture on socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19

On Tuesday 11 August UNU-WIDER director Kunal Sen attended the virtual meeting of the Senior Management Group of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). He was invited to deliver a special lecture to share insights on the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 and development policy implications.

Included in his presentation was evidence on the macroeconomic dimensions of the pandemic, drawing on the recent WIDER Working Paper by Tony Addison, Kunal Sen and Finn Tarp. It also included country-level estimates on the global poverty impacts of COVID-19 based on the recent study by Andy Sumner, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez and Chris Hoy. Further evidence was gathered from preliminary results of the ongoing Life with Corona survey.

The evidence and discussions from the meeting will contribute to ESCSAP’s next theme study, Building back better from crises through regional cooperation in Asia and the Pacific, for the seventy-seventh session of the Commission.