The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is having a profound and deeply damaging impact on the countries where the EBRD works, posing enormous challenges for policymakers across all our regions.
Value destruction – as many economic activities are suspended for a prolonged period of time and businesses risk insolvency – is a major immediate threat to the economy. The EBRD role, in this context, is to protect the economy and transition gains achieved by supporting existing clients to preserve value and survive this period of unprecedented disruption. At the same time, the EBRD, through its investment and policy advice, will play a more systemic role in supporting the broader private sector.
Crucially, the success of such support and the nature and extent of the recovery will depend on how governments respond, particularly as the state participates more actively in the market. The EBRD will therefore also support governments with measures to cope with the immediate disruption of the crisis – including capacity building to address businesses’ concerns and mitigate vulnerabilities across different sectors and especially among small and medium enterprises.
The coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing socio‐economic dislocation have the potential to entrench – and exacerbate – existing inequalities, as well as jeopardise hard‐fought commitments to the green economy transition. Our policy advice will thus aim to ensure an inclusive and gender-sensitive crisis response, strengthen good governance and safeguard the shift to the green economy.
As part of our own policy response, we are monitoring, country by country, the economic channels of disruption associated with the pandemic and the crisis response measures taken by individual governments to date.
Our focus is on the measures and indicators that can foster private sector resilience and enable a rapid recovery once the pandemic subsides.
Because the available data in our countries of operations are diverse, and the indicators we can use are not necessarily comparable, we have also created an EBRD Policy Comparator. It lists the most implemented policies across our countries of operations and shows, country by country, which policies are being implemented, and where
These reports below are live documents complied by our regional economists and will be updated regularly as information, such as economic indicators, becomes available or as the policy of the government changes.
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EBRD Region |
Economy |
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Central Asia |
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Central Europe and Baltic States
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Eastern Europe and the Caucasus
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Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia,
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South-eastern Europe |
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South and Eastern Mediterranean |
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Other |
Supporting SME access to finance amid the Covid-19 crisis
The coronavirus pandemic has reduced the funding of many firms, especially small and medium enterprises. In response, a number of countries in both Western Europe and the EBRD regions have scaled up state credit guarantee schemes to mitigate this urgent liquidity problem and stimulate an economic recovery. Our policy note highlights the design and implementation aspects of these schemes and suggests that this instrument, if well designed and implemented, can be an efficient crisis response mechanism.
Fighting informality in the time of coronavirus: Enhancing business inspections in Serbia
Business inspections are an important mechanism for maintaining fair and equal conditions for all market participants. The importance of well-functioning business inspections is even more relevant during crisis periods, when the grey economy tends to increase and the evasion of regulatory framework and market rules becomes more frequent. This policy note highlights the EBRD’s contribution to fighting informalities in Serbia under the Rapid Advisory Response framework.
We are also proposing a number of financial restructuring and insolvency policy initiatives for the EBRD regions to complement the emergency financial assistance provided by national governments and the international community.
