South Asia is one of the least integrated regions of the world. While  individual member countries have been successfully increased their share of trade in the global market, growth of intraregional trade lags behind the growth of the region’s overall trade. This paper analyses the reasons for this apparently puzzling nature of South Asian economies. The paper decomposes the regional trade statistics between 2000 and 2012 to analyse the dynamics of regional trade and factors behind it. The findings suggest that one of the missing elements is the inability of the region to meet its demand for imports internally with the change of the economic structure. India, being the largest economy, is the main driver of the intraregional trade. The trade preference of the SAARC countries has been changing disfavouring India. This is mainly due to India’s relative inability to meet the import demand of other South Asian countries. In the absence of strengthened economic ability to meet their own demand, the scope for intra-industry trade, emergence of regional value chain, and trade in new areas like services, intraregional trade is unlikely to register any notable improvements

This paper attempts to estimate the economic costs of disability in Bangladesh. Disability tends to reduce economic output by reducing or eliminating the economic contribution of the members with disabilities, their family members, relatives and close friends. The amount by which economic output is reduced constitutes the net economic cost of disability. Four cost components have been taken into consideration in the analysis, which includes: costs due to lack of access to employment; costs due to children with disabilities losing out on school; costs due to adults helping people with disabilities; and costs due to children helping a family member with disabilities. The cumulative cost of the four components is approximately US $1.18 billion per year, which is about 1.74 per cent of Bangladesh’s GDP.

Using HIES 2000 data, the paper presents asset based poverty information so that it is possible to provide incentives in the form of social benefit and fiscal support to the group of people who needs it most. While income based measurements and other methods are available to characterise households under poverty, asset based measurements provide a new insight into poverty and related welfare studies. By applying fractional polynomial regression, it is found that there is a significant relationship between total asset and income. We also find significant results for asset income, profit from enterprises, other assets (including financial asset, jewelry), house value and other income (rent, dividend, interest) in total asset. Meanwhile, variables such as religion, gender of the household head and agricultural income do not significantly affect total asset. People accumulate asset starting from the age of around 20 years which continues until the age of 80 years. The education level of head of the household ranges between class V and class X, when such households move on to higher assets. Except for a few outliers, both asset and income are invested and managed effectively by households to derive return from such investment.

India is a highly open economy having large amount of trade with the rest of the world.  This paper examines the role of imported intermediate goods on Indian inflation behaviour by estimating open economy version of Phillips curve model using quarterly data over the period of 1990 to 2013. The results obtained by applying GMM estimation show that imported intermediate goods play an important role in inflation dynamics via both real marginal cost and exchange rate pass-through. The results are valid when GDP deflator as well as CPI inflation is used as inflation measure.

It is generally observed that fertility determines different economic, social and programme input variables. This study investigates the impact of sector specific (health and education) foreign aid on fertility in the case of Pakistan. The empirical investigation using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) over the period of 1973-2012 shows that sector specific foreign aid to the health and education sector has negative impact on fertility rate in Pakistan. The results further highlight that family planning programme inputs are not adequate to control population growth in Pakistan.