KUWAIT CITY, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait held on Monday the first e-forum to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on economy.
At the forum themed "Financial, economic impacts, and challenges of Coronavirus and how to address them," Khaled Mahdi, secretary-general of the Kuwait's Supreme Council for Planning and Development, said that people use economic models to identify post-crisis expectations.
The repercussions of this crisis are still under discussion globally, and "we must know the repercussions on the world before looking at them at the national level," he added.
The global economy before the coronavirus spread was going through a growth stage over a period of 10 years after 2008, Mahdi said, noting that it was a remarkable growth until the end of the economic cycle in 2019.
The coronavirus crisis came at the time of the beginning of the global economic slowdown and caused a cut in supplies and trade exchange between countries, he said.
Kuwait's national income depends on the oil resource by 90 percent, and what happened to the decline in oil prices led to a decrease in growth rates in the private sector and the labor market was also affected negatively, the official added.
There are ways to gradually recover, he said, adding that an improvement in oil prices is expected during the coming period which contributes to the speed of economic recovery.
Kuwait on Monday reported 687 new COVID-19 cases and four more deaths, raising the tally of infections to 72,400 and the death toll to 482, the Health Ministry said in a statement. Enditem
