December 2021

30 b U ilding resilient migr A tion s Y stems in t H e mediterr A ne A n region

Map 1.2 Cumulative COVID-19 cases per capita, by country, January 2020 to December 2021

Cases per capita ≤ 0.266365 ≤ 0.164797 ≤ 0.094402 ≤ 0.037548

No data

IBRD 46391 | FEBRUARY 2022

Source: world bank, using data from the Covid-19 data repository, Center for systems science and engineering, Johns Hopkins University: https://github.com/Cssegisanddata/Covid-19.

Several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have health care systems that are already overburdened by health needs such as reproductive health, mental health, immunization, care for chronic illness, and other endemic diseases that have broken out in large numbers in the past 10 years. Many Sub-Saharan countries already faced a shortage of health care workers before the pandemic, with only 0.2 physicians per 1,000 inhabitants across the subcontinent in 2020 (as opposed to 3.7 and 2.6 in Europe and North America, respectively) (Lau, Hooper, and Zard 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated these labor shortages in a health care system that was already fragile and lacking infrastructure.

Economic consequences . In addition to the health impacts and loss of lives, the extended Mediterranean region experienced severe economic disruptions. In 2020, the euro area experienced an overall GDP contraction of 6.5 percent—well above both the global average contraction of 3.4 percent and the impacts on the region after the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis (OECD 2021a). Between 2020 and 2021, the euro area’s economy grew by 5.2 percent, slightly less than the world average of 5.6 percent.

In the European countries facing significant challenges in containing the spread of the virus and in those that heavily rely on tourism, output declines were even more severe. For instance, GDP in 2020 dropped by 9 percent in both Greece and Italy, and by 9 percent and 10.8 percent in France and Spain, respectively (OECD 2021a). The pandemic’s economic consequences also hit the southern Mediterranean