Covid-19 a wake-up call to address development fault lines in Asia-Pacific

BANGKOK: The world is emerging from the biggest social and economic shock in living memory, but it will be a long time before the deep scars of the Covid-19 pandemic on human well-being fully heal.

In the Asia-Pacific region, where 60 percent of the world lives, the pandemic revealed chronic development fault lines through its excessively harmful impact on the most vulnerable. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap) estimates that 89 million more people in the region have been pushed back into extreme poverty at the $1.90 per day threshold, erasing years of development gains. The economic and educational shutdowns are likely to have severely harmed human capital formation and productivity, exacerbating poverty and inequality.