OTTAWA, March 30 (Xinhua) -- As the first quarter ends, the battering that Canada's economy has taken as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic could worsen if social distancing, currently in place across the country, continues until the end of August, according to the Conference Board of Canada.
Should that happen, the Ottawa-based research organization predicts that Canada's real GDP would fall by 1.1 percent in 2020, a sharp reversal from 2019, when the country's economy grew by 1.6 percent.
The Conference Board forecast also estimates that over 330,000 jobs could be lost over the second and third quarters of 2020, hiking Canada's unemployment rate to 7.7 percent -- a more positive outlook than the one recently offered by the office of Canada's independent Parliamentary Budget Officer.
It expects that Canada's real GDP growth will decline by 5.1 percent this year, "the weakest on record since 1962," according to a report released on Friday. Canada's unemployment rate, which is estimated at 10 percent following a flurry of layoffs, is forecast to rise to 15 percent over the summer.
In one week alone this month, some 927,000 Canadians lost their jobs, and more than 20 times, or around 45,000 people filed for employment insurance benefits, according to TD Bank in a recent economics report.
The bank projects Canada's unemployment rate to reach 12 percent in the second quarter, but be cut in half by the end of this year.
However, another report released earlier in March suggests that Canada's economy had already stalled at the end of last year.
The country's real GDP growth "slowed to a crawl" to 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to Philip Cross, a Munk Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank.
