Global outlook c h a p t e r 1

participating debtor countries (Cline 1995; Rieffel 
2003). These large reductions helped launch 
recoveries in the 1990s (Kose, Nagle et al. 2020; 
Reinhart and Trebesch 2016).
1
The G20’s recently announced common approach 
to providing debt relief for the poorest countries is 
a step to facilitate coordination among both Paris 
Club and non-Paris Club bilateral lenders (G20 
2020). However, besides enhancing transparency, 
increased participation of private creditors and 
their equal treatment with official bilateral 
creditors will be critical to achieving an equitable 
and durable outcome (Bulow et al. 2020; World 
Bank 2020t).
On the health front, coordinated global efforts 
across governments, the private sector, and 
multilateral institutions in developing, producing, 
and disseminating COVID-19 vaccines are 
critically important to ensure timely and equitable 
access across countries and a sustained reduction 
in global infection rates (Weintraub, Yadav, and 
Berkley 2020). In particular, countries with high 
vaccine development and production capacity can 
actively participate in coordinated international 
approaches to vaccine dissemination, seeking to 
promote the affordable and equitable distribution 
of vaccines amongst their lower-income peers 
(Ghebreyesus 2020). 
In the longer term, safeguarding multilateral 
institutions, including their role in settling dis-
1 
Another historical example is the London Debt Agreement of 
1953, under which 20 sovereign states collaborated to reduce West 
Germany’s external debt by about 50 percent, contributing to West 
Germany’s postwar economic revival (Guinnane 2015; Kaiser 2013).

---

C H A P T E R 1 
G L O B A L E C O N O M I C P R O S P E C T S | J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 1