Achieving Sustainable Recovery: Criteria for Evaluating the Sustainability and Effectiveness of Covid-19 Recovery Investments in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has precipitated unprecedented health, social and economic crises across the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. All countries in the region moved quickly to implement rescue policies to safeguard lives and livelihoods. The rescue phase continues along with the challenge of orchestrating the post-COVID-19 economic recovery: designing packages of investments and initiatives to stimulate employment, liquidity, reignite sustainable and inclusive economic growth and transition towards net-zero emission and climate-resilience economies to confront the worsening climate and ecological crisis. These policies must be sustainable in the short and long term and bring institutional, social, economic/financial, and environmental co-benefits. This working paper proposes criteria for evaluating the sustainability of recovery investments and initiatives, to serve as a checklist for stakeholders to use to ensure a recovery that builds an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for all.

A Green Costa Rican COVID-19 Recovery: Aligning Costa Rica's Decarbonization Investments with Economic Recovery

“…These green industrial policies are sector-specific interventions that seek to change the economic production structure while supporting the development of critical new technologies and generating environmental benefits, even in the absence of carbon pricing (Hallegatte, Fay, and Vogt-Schilb, 2013). This approach is particularly important for Latin America and the Caribbean region, which registered a loss of 7.4 percent of its GDP as a result of COVID-19 and is currently struggling to keep pace with economic recovery, even though most countries have implemented policies to counteract the negative impacts of the pandemic (Watkins, Breton, andEdwards, 2021: Cavallo, Powell, andSerebrisky, 2020). For example, recent evidence suggests that, if correctly implemented, green industrial policies in the region could generate 15 million more jobs compared with a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario (Vogt-Schilb, 2021).…”