Since late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has been spreading globally. The pandemic has affected all aspects of global society and has caused specific challenges for both the government and private sectors in most countries. While we do not yet know the full impact of the pandemic on poor African countries, we already know that the impacts on economies, health conditions and politics are significant – and will continue to be substantial. In this brief, we discuss the long-term implications and effects of the pandemic on Domestic Resource Mobilisation in sub-Saharan Africa. The brief builds on the report Implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for revenue generation in poor African countries.
Main points
1. The pandemic’s largest impact on economic growth so far has been in tourism-dependent economies.
2. In Tanzania, for example, the GDP growth rate fell from 5.8% in 2019 to 2.0% in 2020 and per capita growth turned negative for the first time in 25 years because of the pandemic.
3. For poor countries, which already faced significant underfunding of their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the pandemic has both increased the need for more revenue and made its domestic resource mobilisation more difficult.
