The outbreak of Coronavirus in December 2019 which started from a small city called Wuhan in China has an epidemic and subsequently spread to become a global pandemic barely three months after, this pandemic also has an adverse effect on many countries economy and it has affected the economy globally. It has caused the closures of businesses, the stoppage of factory outputs, and the disruption to global manufacturing industries and their supply networks. The economic shock propagates downstream to customers through lack of supplies, and upstream to suppliers through lack of demand. The challenge faced by economies around the world now is mostly a struggle between lives and livelihoods. The pandemic has crushed hopes for stronger growth on the backdrop of previously expected output gains for the year 2020. The initial shock has continued to intensify through familiar channels from past severe downturns and crises. Financial markets are sharply repricing with the increase in uncertainty and the sudden materialization of extensive disruptions to economic activity. The flight to safe assets and rush to liquidity have put upward pressure on borrowing costs and credit has become more scarce, aggravating financial strains. This has led to a downward revision of global economic outlook for the year 2020.
The International Monetary fund (IMF) expects the 2020 world growth to be below 2.9 per cent rate for 2019 and argues that the world might just witness the slowest economic growth pace since the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Trade wars pushed global growth last year to the lowest rates since 2009. Tensions between the USA and China as well as oil price tensions between oil giants Saudi Arabia and Russia among other major international economic issues led to very volatile global economic terrain for the year 2019. While the exact economic implication of the tensions is yet to fully manifest, the implications of an ongoing global pandemic only leave the globe in a more precarious state. Perhaps, there is no worse time than now for the global economy to be hit by a pandemic than after a very volatile 2019. A global recession is almost inevitable as countries begin to count their losses to the outbreak. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of how countries, global institutions as well as international figures have responded to the pandemic. It also seek to evaluate if there is a commonality in policy responses to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the looming 2020 economic crisis. The latter part of this work tend to highlight the following: The current state of the economy, global responses to the 2007-2009 global recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, the looming and global recession, the commonalities of both global events and finally the concluding section which summarizes the paper