South Asia Investor Review

A 2024 joint study of the International Labor Organization and the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority  (SMEDA) estimated Pakistan's undocumented economy at $457 billion. While other South Asian nations, particularly Bangladesh and India, do include estimated undocumented GDP figures in their official GDP, Pakistan's official GDP figures do not include such estimates. If the Pakistani government decides to include estimates of the informal economy in its official figures, the country's GDP would jump to $1,059  billion in market exchange terms and over $4,000 billion in PPP terms.  Pakistan's Total GDP, including Undocumented, Estimated at over $1 Trillion In 2023 when the  ILO-SMEDA study  was conducted, Pakistan's official GDP was $340 billion (34% less than the undocumented GDP), bringing the total real GDP for 2023 to $797 billion. Pakistan's official GDP figure for 2025-26 is projected to be $452 billion. Assuming that the undocumented GDP has...

Female labor force participation rate in India has recently fallen to just 19%, the second lowest after Afghanistan's 15% in the South Asia region. By contrast, Pakistan's  women's labor force  participation rate is 21%, Sri Lanka's 31% and Bangladesh's 35%. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's mishandling of the COVID19 pandemic has hit Indian women particularly hard, with 90% of those who lost their jobs now shut out of the workforce.  Female Labor Force Participation Rate in South Asia. Source: World Bank The precipitous loss of women workers is disastrous news for India's economy, which had started slowing before the  COVID19  pandemic, according to a  Bloomberg  report. Rosa Abraham, an economics professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, tracked more than 20,000 people as they navigated the labor market during the pandemic.. She found that after the first lockdown, women were several times more likely to lose their jobs than men and far less lik...