POLICY JOURNAL AUTHORS’ RETREAT TO PRESENT ANALYSES AND SUGGESTIONS ON COVID-19 IMPACT
The COVID-19 pandemic dominated policy discourse for more than two years from early 2020, when the health and economic impacts of the virus first began to affect countries across the globe. Concerns around viral transmission and overburdened health systems caused many governments to adopt strict containment strategies to slow down the spread of the virus, including restrictions on the movement of people and goods that led to massive supply chain disruptions and slowdowns in several economic sectors. Unsurprisingly, the poorest and most marginalized were worse hit by the economic consequences of the pandemic.
The editors and authors of a special issue of the Applied Economics Perspectives and Policy (AEPP), the policy journal of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association, titled – “COVID-19 in South Asia: Lessons from a time of upheaval” gathered in Kathmandu, Nepal for a workshop from October 17 and 18, 2022, to present and discuss the micro- and macro-economic analyses of the impacts of COVID-19 and associated shocks in countries across the region.
The main motivation for bringing out this special issue is to publish a set of forward-looking, applied policy analyses with the aim of informing future policies. The authors’ retreat is being organized by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System for Asia (ReSAKSS-Asia) supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
In several developing countries, COVID-19 and associated public policies wiped out hard-earned economic, social, and health and nutrition-related gains achieved over the past decade. Through these successive waves, the pandemic also exposed vulnerabilities in several South Asian economies that make them particularly susceptible to shocks of this kind: low levels of urbanization and development, high rates of internal and external migration and subsequent dependence on remittance incomes, labor-intensive industries, precarious, underfunded health systems, high rates of food insecurity and malnutrition, severe gender disparities, uncoordinated agricultural markets, and income and wealth inequalities. The situation has since been further exacerbated by other unrelated events: a military coup in Myanmar, political instability in Pakistan, the collapse of the government in Sri Lanka, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, among others.
Developing resilience against future shocks of this kind will require deeper structural changes. The last two and a half years have indisputably stalled both national and global development agendas. Economically, South Asia was the fastest-growing region in the world from 2014 until the onset of COVID-19, with clear signs of structural transformation— rising real wages, a declining share of agriculture in GDP, and a sizeable non-farm sector that was steadily growing in prominence. Examples of transforming economies facing shocks of the magnitude of COVID-19 are rare in history, those of economies suffering multiple such shocks even rarer, and very little is known about what it will take for countries in the region to return to their pre-pandemic trajectories.
This special issue brings together papers on five critical topics. First, agriculture and agricultural value chains, with papers examining the interaction between COVID-19, agricultural trade and food price inflation in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the impact of the pandemic on specific value chains in Bangladesh and India, and detailed investigations into the rise in food insecurity and seasonal poverty. Second, labor market policies, including the role of a specific safety net targeted to displaced migrants and the critical role of social identity in determining job losses in India. Third, several papers addressing resilience, or the ability of affected individuals and households to recover after being affected by a shock of this kind, including analyses in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Fourth, the compounded impact of multiple crises, with Sri Lanka and Myanmar as case studies. Fifth and finally, a set of papers that ‘zoom out’ to look at economy-wide macroeconomic implications of COVID-19, in Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Pakistan.
