Socio-economic Scenario of South Asia: An Overview of Impacts of COVID-19

Abstract

The present study explores the socio-economic scenario of the South Asian region before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyses the long run and short-run association between human development, unemployment and the economic growth of the region using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model before the situation of the pandemic. It was found that human development has both short-run and long-run association, while the unemployment level has only a long run association with economic growth of the South Asian region. The study suggests that maintaining quality and growth sustainability during and after the pandemic situation will ultimately depend on the human development aspects of the region in terms of appropriate fiscal and monetary policy, vocational training, increased dependence on domestic production and consumption.