Countries fighting Covid-19 in decentralised manner doing better: Raghuram Rajan
Jul 24 2020: NEW DELHI: Former Reserve Bank of India(RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan has said the countries that tried to fight coronavirus
pandemic
in a decentralised manner have done reasonably well as compared to others.
Citing the example of Germany and South Korea, Rajan said that these countries have allocated resources at the centre but left the details to provinces.
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In case of India, he said, as a result of the nation-wide lockdown, which was imposed after four hours notice with effect from March 25, the regions which did not have coronavirus cases at that time suffered economically.
“I do want to point out difficulty of having decision taken at the centre, when the centre does not know what is happening in much of the country. Take for example, the Indian decision to essentially close down.
“…you soon found that some areas which did not had many coronavirus infections were actually suffering economically so the entire national lockdown had to be withdrawn perhaps too early in some place,” Rajan said in an interview with
.CoronaNomics is a Youtube channel where the world’s top economic experts discuss how to tackle the economic impact of coronavirus.
He also pointed out that Mumbai and Delhi were at the centre of infections when nationwide lockdown was announced but some areas of northeast did not have many infections at the time.
