Socio-Economic Impact of Financial Crisis on Households in South Asia

Financial Crisis of 2008 has profoundly impacted the lives of people. A number of studies tried to investigate this impact in different countries but mainly through the angle of macroeconomic shocks and most of the research has been in the developed world. This book is primarily written in the context of households in four South Asian countries where poverty and unemployment are already high and social safety nets are almost non-existent. The economies of these countries are unable to provide fiscal space to adequately finance social protection programs. Most of these countries borrow from IMF and World Bank to stabilize their economies and finance development projects. The conditionalities of multilateral institutions further reduce the fiscal space and tighten the financing of social protection programs. In these circumstances, any exogenous shock plays havoc to already vulnerable households and push them further into a poverty trap. The study looks into different dimensions of the financial crisis and its impact on household through a survey of 1000 households. It also analyzed the adequacy of social protection programs such as cash transfer programs in alleviating the poverty.