Recovery at a Crossroads: How countries spent Covid-19 funds in the Global South

In many cases it is hard for citizens, journalists or parliamentarians over the transparency among other actors to track the funds, both at the international level of of the spending of funding agreements from IFIs, but also at the national level in terms of the gaps between big recovery package announcements and actual spending recovery funds. [...] This financing came more than a year into the pandemic because the US administration initially unilaterally blocked this from happen- ing.4 Because of the way in which the IMF governance system works that rewards the size and openness of economies, only 42 percent (USD $274 billion) of the total allocation went to Global South countries, while less than 4 percent (USD $21 billion) of the allocatio. [...] This is despite the fact that up to 68 percent of the workforce is in the informal sector, including 1.7 million women many of whom, as a result of the pandemic, were forced to leave the formal and informal labour markets altogether. [...] However, such analysis does not see the proactive role of the state and the multilateral institutions in terms of altering the market distribution of income and wealth, and regulating markets in order to achieve socially and environmentally desirable outcomes. [...] Given that the largest economic responses to the pandemic were in the initial months of our reference period, we feel that the said methods present a depiction of the intentions of the nine national governments analysed.