The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed chronic development fault lines in Asia and the Pacific, taking a heavy toll on the social and economic well-being of the region’s people. 

The Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2021 takes stock of the socioeconomic fallout from the current pandemic and looks at past economic and non-economic shocks that have inflicted damage on the region’s sustainable development prospects in order to draw lessons on how to build forward better during the post-pandemic recovery. 

This report examines selected policy options to meet immediate and medium-term financing needs. These include debt service suspensions, debt swaps for development, sovereign bond financing, public debt management, emergency financing mechanisms and sustainable investing by public institutional investors. It also presents the contours of policy packages that are needed in this regard are presented and analyses the impact of implementing them across the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.