Global economic activity that has suffered from the coronavirus pandemic may not fully recover even by the end of 2021, said INF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath.

Earlier, the IMF lowered its economic outlook. The world economy is expected to contract by 3% this year, and next year it will grow by 5.8% - a rebound that Gopinath called "partial recovery,” CNBC reported.

“We have a recovery projected for 2021 of 5.8% growth, but that is a partial recovery,” she told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Friday.

“So even by the end of 2021, we’re expecting level of economic activity to be below what we had projected before the virus,” she added.

Governments and central banks around the world have taken steps to help businesses and households survive the crisis - an answer that, according to Gopinath, was “aggressive” and “quick.”

“I think if you compare that to the global financial crisis ... the response has been just that much speedier and the scale of it has been that much bigger,” she said, noting that economies around the world have announced about $8 trillion worth of fiscal stimulus.

However, she noted that the number of incentives is not “equally distributed” across countries: about $ 7 trillion comes from G-20 countries. “The concern we have is more about developing and emerging economies that have less of a fiscal space, have to deal with external account problems, and I think they’re in a tougher spot,” she said.