Coronavirus Impact On Business: Global Economy Could Lose As Much As $82 Trillion Over Five Years, British University Says

The U.K.-based Centre for Risk Studies at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School said Tuesday that the global economy could lose as much as $82 trillion over five years if there is an “economic depression” scenario due to the coronavirus. The university has developed a metric called GDP@Risk that projects global economic damage due to disaster scenarios such as cyberattacks and pandemics.

If the global economy witnesses an “optimistic recovery” over the next five years, only $3.3 trillion would be lost. A mid-range consensus by economists says $26.8 trillion would be lost in a moderate scenario.

“GDP@Risk was designed as a constant metric that can be used to compare and standardize different types of threat,” Andrew Coburn, Chief Scientist at the Risk Center at Cambridge said. “The new calculations on GDP@Risk from the pandemic are not forecasts, but rather are projections based on various plausible scenarios that could unfold in the next five years related to the economic impact of COVID-19.”

The International Monetary Fund said in April that the world is entering its “worst economic downturn” since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, as countries shut down non-essential businesses to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. In the first quarter of the year, the U.S. economy, the largest in the world, shrank by 4.8%. China, the world’s second-largest economy, saw GDP drop by 6.8% in the first quarter, its worst three-month growth period in decades.

Japan, the third-largest economy, shrank by 3.4% in the first three months of the year. European economies are also hard-hit by the virus, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron unveiling a 500 billion euro ($546 billion) recovery fund on Monday to help the European Union bounce back from the pandemic.

Although economies are reopening businesses amid the pandemic, some public health experts have warned of a second wave of the virus in the winter. As of Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, there are 4,629,503 global cases of the virus, with a death toll of 297,380.