Finance Minister Tito Mboweni indicated South Africa had approached the World Bank and other foreign lenders to discuss help in fighting the virus threat, and that the national budget was being revised.
The Treasury was to brief the Cabinet today on a set of proposals to revive the economy.
His statement followed the Reserve Bank’s announcement that it had cut the repo rate by another 100 basis points, taking it down to 4.25% – the second such cut since 19 March.
The bank also lowered its estimate of South Africa’s economic contraction for the year from between 2% and 4% to 6.1%.
Mboweni warned that the pandemic was expected to push the economy into a deep recession over the remainder of 2020.
This came as positive cases in the country rose by 143 to 2 415, with the number of deaths remaining 27.
Protests in Mitchells Plain in the Western Cape, evidently over food parcels, hinted at the gathering economic difficulties being felt at household level.
Mboweni said the budget revision was aimed at ensuring the health authorities had sufficient resources to respond to the outbreak.
He said a ‘facility’ of $60 million was being considered from the World Bank. The country was looking at programmes that excluded structural reform programmes.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it anticipated the global economy would contract by 3% this year, described the likely decline as being the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
It said the pandemic had plunged the world into a ‘crisis like no other’, which would test the ability of governments and central banks to control the crisis.
The IMF’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath, said the crisis could knock $9 trillion off global GDP over the next two years.