
Spain overtook China in the number of those infected with coronavirus on Monday as the government tightened restrictions on a population entering its third week under one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe.

World leaders on Thursday promised US$5 trillion to stave off global economic collapse from the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 21,000 people and shut down huge swathes of the globe.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Wednesday vowed that unemployment would not reach 20%, seeking to clarify comments he made a day earlier on a worst-case economic scenario resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

Chile’s jobless rate rose to 7.0% during the October to December period, the government said on Friday, an early, but still tepid, sign of the potential impact of two months of unrest in late 2019.

Argentina’s unemployment rate rose to 9.7% in the third quarter versus 9.0% in the same period last year, marking one of the highest rates recorded in recent years, the official INDEC statistics agency said.

The Trump administration said on Wednesday it will make it harder for states to keep residents in the U.S. food stamp program in a move that is projected to end benefits for nearly 700,000 people.

Brazil's unemployment rate fell to 11.6% in the quarter ending in October, from 11.8% in the quarter ending in July, the country's Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) announced. The rate also fell slightly, compared with the same period of 2018 when it was at 11.7%.

Unemployment in Argentina reached 10.6% in the second quarter of 2019, the highest ever since President Mauricio Macri took office in December, 2015, according to data released Thursday by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC).

Argentina's unemployment rate rose to 10.1% in the first quarter from 9.1% in the first three months of last year, the official INDEC statistics agency said. This is the highest level since current president Mauricio Macri took office, and the worst in thirteen years.

Unemployment in the UK fell by 27,000 in the three months to February to 1.34 million, official Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show. The number of people in work was also virtually unchanged at a record high of 32.7 million, with a jump of 179,000.