UN Study: Pandemic Will Wipe Out $42 Billion in Arab Countries

A report by the UN’s Economic Commission for Western Asia has warned that the coronavirus pandemic could lead to a loss of 1.7 million jobs in Arab-majority countries in 2020, raising their collective unemployment rate by 1.2 percentage points. It also predicted that Arab nations’ gross domestic product would shrink by at least $42 billion this year due to virus-related restrictions and plummeting oil prices. “Unlike in the aftermath of the global 2008 financial crisis, employment is expected to be affected across all sectors,” the report said. A separate study by the International Labor Organization anticipates large income losses for workers across the Middle East and North Africa, and pegs the global total somewhere between $860 billion and $3.4 trillion. Arab countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Jordan have moved to virtual lockdown ^[1] as the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Middle East has surpassed 17,000. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization implored regional states to share more information about coronavirus cases to offset the “uneven” fight against the disease. “While we have observed impressive progress in several countries, not all are yet applying the whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach,” the WHO’s director for the Eastern Mediterranean said. “The time to act is now. I cannot stress enough the level of urgency.”