Latin America will emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic with higher poverty rates as efforts to control the virus lead to spikes in unemployment and indebtedness, Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno has said in an interview.

Latin America, where economic growth has already been slowing in recent years, is expected to see an economic contraction of 8 per cent to 10pc in 2020 as a result of the coronavirus and associated quarantine measures, Moreno said.

The pandemic “will impoverish not only Latin Americans, (but also) the world in general, but clearly Latin America is going to be hit much harder because we are an emerging (market) region,” he said, according to Reuters.