Photo: The Balance

XINHUA

Mexico called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank on Thursday, Oct. 15, to establish a support strategy for middle-income countries, saying they have no financial wiggle room to tackle the economic fallout caused by the covid-19 pandemic.

Countries such as Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Bulgaria cannot afford to take the kind of emergency financial measures that developed countries have adopted, Mexico’s Finance (Hacienda) Secretary Arturo Herrera said.

“We do not have these margins of maneuver, neither social nor fiscal nor economic,” Herrera said in a video posted on Twitter.

“Unlike richer countries, we do not do ‘everything that is needed,’ but we do what we can.”

Herrera participated Wednesday morning in the virtual annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, which are usually held at their headquarters in Washington.

The central theme of this year’s meetings focuses on the recovery of the global economy as the pandemic persists.

In its latest World Economic Report released Tuesday, Oct. 13, the IMF projected that the global economy will contract 4.4 percent in 2020 and warned that the road out of the crisis will likely be “long, uneven and highly uncertain.”

…Oct. 16, 2020