Olga Koulaeva, Director of the ILO Office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, shared her view on how to stimulate economy and employment in the context of a deepening crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic.

On 20 May 2020, the first webinar entitled “Employment and Labour Market Affected by COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Overview, Regional Context and Crisis Mitigation Measures” was organized. More than 150 representatives of Governments and social partners, researchers, business community from countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and a number of international experts took part in the webinar.

Olga Koulaeva, Director of the ILO Office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Mikhail Pouchkin, Senior Employment Specialist, and Leonid Andreev, international expert from Norway, shared their views on how to stimulate economy and employment in the context of a deepening crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic.

In her opening presentation, Olga Koulaeva noted that COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on public health and brought unprecedented shocks to economies and labour markets. Through a  massive economic disruption, the COVID-19 crisis is affecting the world’s workforce, and employment impact of COVID-19 is deep and far-reaching. The ILO recognized early that the present crisis is quite different from the previous one, and developed a four-pillar policy framework for tackling the current socio-economic impact by stimulating the economy and employment; supporting enterprises, jobs and incomes; protecting workers in the workplace, and relying on social dialogue for solutions.

Leonid Andreev presented regional trends and provided data from the selected members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). He discussed the forecast about how long the economic slowdown could last and identified some critical aspects that could impede quick economic recovery, such as the pandemic spread rate, severity and types of quarantine measures, the impact on the labour demand and producers supply chains, changes in people's behavior and prices in the commodity markets, especially oil prices affecting the most dynamic regional economies. He stressed the importance of persistent and coordinated policy efforts to provide employment and income support, and stimulate the economies and labour demand, as a critical response for preventing a chain of supply shocks and demand shocks that could lead to a prolonged economic downturn.

The presentations were followed by Q&A session.

The event was organized in the framework of the project “Partnerships for Youth Employment in the CIS” being implemented in partnership with the Russian company LUKOIL.