Experts: Global solidarity needed to fight COVID-19, economic slowdown

Fahad Alturki, vice-president and head of research at the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, said inclusive, balanced and sustainable measures are needed to restore economic development.

More efforts are also needed to learn from each other and share experiences, help people in need, restore the economy and the functions of societies to a healthy level, employ forward-looking fiscal measures, and enhance social and economic resilience to deal with future crises, Alturki added.

"Reforming the WTO is extremely important because the global economy needs trade rules," said

Masahiro Kawai, representative director and director-general of Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia, a Japan-based institute committed to strengthening regional economic development and cooperation.

Pushing ahead the WTO reforms in such areas as dispute settlement and policy transparency and reporting will help shore up global trade, which is a key channel for economic growth in many countries but has been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Kawai.

He added that the Japanese economy seems to have reached its bottom in May and June and will start recovering in the second half of the year if the country is successful in containing COVID-19 infection cases.

Antonio Villafranca, research coordinator and co-head of the Europe and Global Governance Centre, Italian Institute for International Political Studies, sharing the Europe Union’s efforts to battle the coronavirus, said: "For the first time in history, the European Union is going to raise altogether up to 750 billion euros. This is really unprecedented, something that if anybody told me that four months ago five months ago, I would say he or she would be crazy because that was absolutely impossible in the European Union. Still we did it.

"But we have to acknowledge that there would not be such a dire need for economic response if we have managed to improve our healthcare response sufficiently.

The better we are at responding to the pandemic from a healthcare perspective, the less we need an economic response, a strong economic response. This is a link that we have to acknowledge."