COVID-19 in South Asia: Lessons from a time of upheaval

In early 2022, Sudha Narayanan, Shahidur Rashid, and I (IFPRI), and Alex Winter-Nelson (University of Illinois) began pulling together a Special Issue for the journal Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy focused on COVID-19 in South Asia. Our goal was to distill forward-looking lessons for the developing world by drawing on similar and disparate country-level experiences. The issue is now available online and its 14 papers provide important lessons for future shocks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic as a global public health emergency, but it will be a while before we forget the upheaval it caused in the early months of 2020 and how it drove our lives to an almost complete standstill. Among other (far more serious) consequences, researchers in fields that relied heavily on primary data collection—including some of us—suddenly faced the prospect of not being able to do the work they loved.