The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has revised its projections for the global GDP growth in 2021 to 5.6 percent this year, an upward revision of more than 1 percent from the December OECD Economic Outlook, expecting the world output to reach pre-pandemic levels by mid 2021, but much will depend on the race between vaccines and emerging variants of the virus.

In its recent report, the OECD said that recent months witnessed signs of a rebound in goods trade and industrial production, adding that activity in many sectors has picked up and partially adapted to pandemic restrictions.

On vaccine rollout, the report expected that it is likely to provide a major boost to global economic activity, despite it being uneven, while prospects for sustainable growth vary widely between countries and sectors.

The report called for faster and more effective vaccination deployment across the world for the good of global economic activity.

“Speeding up vaccine production and rollout is the best economic policy available today to boost growth and job creation”, said the report.

In this respect, the report noted that global economic growth would improve if production and distribution of doses accelerates, is better coordinated around the world, and gets ahead of virus mutations, which would allow containment measures to be relaxed more rapidly and global output to approach pre-pandemic projections for activity.

However, consumer spending and business confidence would be hit if vaccination programmes are not fast enough to cut infection rates or if new variants become more widespread and require changes to current vaccines, according to the report.