Former UN Chief Javier Perez de Cuellar passed away at the age of 100. He served as the president of the UN Security Council from 1973 to 1974. He also worked as United Nations Secretary General from 1981 to 1991. He was often called as a “pacifist by vocation and nature.” He was honored Prince of Asturias Prize for the promotion of Ibero-American cooperation in 1987.
The presidency of United Nations Security Council for March 2020 has been taken over by China. China has taken over the presidency with a pledge of boosting solidarity and cooperation with all the parties.
Indian-origin Alok Sharma was named as the new UK Minister in charge of the crunch UN climate talks to be hosted by Britain.
The United Nations annually celebrates World Radio Day on 13th of February. The United Nations observes World Radio Day to spread greater awareness among the public and the media of the value of radio.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially titled the disease caused by the new coronavirus as “Covid-2019”. The new name “Covid-2019” has been derived from the words “corona”, “virus” and “disease”, with 2019, the year in which it came up.
The UN projects India’s economy to grow by 5.7 percent in the current fiscal year and expects it to rise to 6.6 percent in the next fiscal year. The UN growth estimate for the current fiscal is drastically lower than the forecast of 7.6 per cent made in last year’s report in January and 7 percent in the May update.
The head of UN’s Global Economic Monitoring Branch, Dawn Holland, told IANS that although there has been a steep decline in growth, India was still one of the high performers globally. He said that it was expected to improve its growth rate in the coming year because of the steps being taken.
According to the report, only China has a higher growth rate than India among the world’s large economies with a 6 per cent forecast for the current calendar year.
According to UN’s International Labour Organization report – Global unemployment is projected to increase by around 5 million in 2020. Almost half a billion people are working fewer paid hours than they would like or lack adequate access to paid work.
The World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2020 (WESO) report has been released and it states that global unemployment has been roughly stable for the last nine years but slowing global economic growth means that, as the global labour force increases, not enough new jobs are being generated to absorb new entrants to the labour market.