Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

Opinion | Coronavirus recovery: Asia-Pacific must focus on three areas in its post-pandemic plans

With 89 million more people in the region pushed back into extreme poverty, policy packages should align with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

They should focus on ensuring universal access to health care and social protection, closing the digital divide and strengthening climate and energy actions

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Volunteers transport packages of food and supplies to be distributed to the needy in Bangkok on April 2, 2020. Photo: AFP

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

Published: 3:30am, 30 Mar 2021Updated: 4:18am, 30 Mar 2021

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 per cent 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 US$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.

The pandemic has taught us that Asia-Pacific countries can no longer put off protecting development gains from adverse shocks. We need to rebuild better towards a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable future.

02:24

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We know that the post-pandemic outlook remains highly uncertain. The 2021 Economic and Social Survey for Asia and the Pacific released by ESCAP shows that regional economic recovery will be vulnerable to the continuing Covid-19 threats and a likely uneven vaccine roll-out. Worse, there is a risk that economic recovery will be skewed towards the better off – a “K-shaped” recovery that further marginalises poorer countries and the disadvantaged.