As the world continues to deal with the ever-increasing strain of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bloomberg has ranked economies across the globe for their levels of misery and South Africa’s outlook isn’t great.
Falling just behind Argentina and Venezuela, the country has earned itself the title of third most miserable economy of 2020.
The Bloomberg Misery Index, now six years old, uses low inflation and unemployment to show how good a country’s resident’s are feeling.
“This year’s scores are based on Bloomberg surveys of economists’ estimates for 2020 price growth and joblessness in each economy and compares those values to last year’s actual data. The index includes countries for which Bloomberg has sufficient economic forecasts,” reads the report.
SA “achieved” this ranking due to unemployment rates being at 30%, the country’s highest rate of unemployment recorded in a decade. Government estimates predict that up to 7-million people could lose their job or source of incoming in 2020.
Bloomberg noted that the general economic status across the globe had dipped during the pandemic.
The world’s least miserable economies for 2020 are Thailand, Singapore, Japan, Switzerland and Malaysia.
A huge jump in negative ranking was experienced by the US, moving from 50th place to 25th place.
Luxembourg was among one of the few economies to experience positive growth from 2019 to 2020, moving from 30 to 47.
Inflation is being blamed for most of the negative growth among countries with deflation expected to change the rankings significantly later in the year.
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