After the turmoil of the past two years, the consensus among economic pundits is that 2022 will be calmer. But in late 2019, when the first reports of a new coronavirus started to filter out from Wuhan in China, few imagined within months that the world economy would be flattened by a pandemic.

In the period leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis, a few prescient voices warned of potentially catastrophic systemic instability.

Finance ministers, central bank governors, and political leaders are hard at work preparing for the 2021 G20 Heads of State and Government Summit in Rome on 30-31 October.

If an evil mind were to engineer the perfect virus to wipe out an animal species, it would choose the optimal combination of transmissibility and infection fatality rate.

The latest G7 summit was a waste of resources. If it had to be held at all, it should have been conducted online, saving time, logistical costs, and airplane emissions. But, more fundamentally, G7 summits are an anachronism.

COVID-19 vaccination programs are gaining momentum as production capacity ramps up, and as disorganised and tentative distribution and administration procedures are replaced by more robust systems. A task of this size will surely encounter additional bumps along the road.

Over the past year, rich-country governments and central banks have provided unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus to help mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is probably premature to offer an assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic’s possible consequences, not least because there may well be many more twists and turns to come. And once we defeat the coronavirus, some of the pandemic-induced changes to our lives might turn out to have been temporary.

On 6 January, when a mob of United States (US) President Donald Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol with shocking ease, the world’s already-low expectations of the US plummeted. And yet, when it comes to the global economy, there are immediate steps President-elect Joe Biden can take to boost the world’s – and especially developing economies’ – prospects. To be sure, the limits of US global leadership are significant.

China’s economy seems largely to have bounced back from the COVID-19 shock. It registered 4.9 percent annual growth in the third quarter of 2020, and the rate may well exceed five percent growth in the fourth quarter. The result would be at least two percent annual full-year growth – not bad at a time when much of the world is facing a pandemic-induced recession. But that doesn’t mean smooth sailing ahead.