Ilan Noy, Nguyen Doan, Benno Ferrarini, Donghyun Park
With the exception of some flashpoints in Northern and Southern Africa, the continent has been largely spared from the direct health effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the African economy has been significantly hurt by the economic consequences of Covid-19, which piled on other ongoing calamities such as the locust crisis devasting crops across the continent (Evenett and Baldwin 2021). Economies in the continent are heavily dependent on commodity exports (Arezki and Fan 2020), foreign direct investment, remittances, aid as well as tourism – a sector which has been devastated by the pandemic and is unlikely to recover quickly (Djankov 2020).