The situation in the Belarusian economy is controlled, despite the coronavirus pandemic, said Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko on Wednesday.
Many countries, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, introduced quarantine and restrictions on population movement, which affected the work of national economies. Belarus did not introduce such measures, combating the spread of infection focally – by isolating the sick and their contacts, and also did not limit the work of enterprises, trying to preserve jobs and labor collectives. According to the basic macroeconomic scenario, the economic growth of the republic in 2020 is planned at 2.8%. At the same time, a budgetary, conservative scenario has also been formed, which assumes a 1.9% GDP growth for the year.
“Speaking about the situation as a whole, I don’t want to say that it’s absolutely rosy that we easily go through this period, but it’s controlled”, – Golovchenko said in Borisov (Minsk region) during a conversation with the staff of Borisov Automobile and Tractor Electrical Equipment OJSC – Management company of the holding “Automotive Components”. The words of the prime minister are quoted by Sputnik Belarus.
He drew attention to the difficulties that countries and enterprises that stopped production had to deal with in the post-quarantine period.
“If in five months we missed 1.8% of GDP (compared with the same period last year – ed.), then these figures in the Russian Federation and EU countries are many times greater”, – Golovchenko said.
According to him, “these figures can be compensated in some way at the expense of budgets, someone has such reserves, someone has minerals that can provide a certain airbag”.
“We do not have such reserves. We can spend what we produce with our own hands and heads”, – the head of the Belarusian government emphasized.
The World Health Organization on March 11 announced an outbreak of a new coronavirus infection COVID-19 with a pandemic. According to the latest WHO data, more than 11.5 million cases of infection have been identified in the world, more than 535 thousand people have died.
According to data on Wednesday, the number of officially registered cases of COVID-19 in Belarus reached 64,224, 443 patients died. Previously, the maximum increase in infections in the country per day reached 973, but recently there has been a tendency to decrease this figure to less than 300. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has stated that the republic has already triumphed over coronavirus infection, although it still does not reduce the degree of fight against it.