Introduction: Sri Lanka’s economic jeopardy, Pakistan’s devastating floods, a global disaster in terms of growth, economic slowdown, terrorist outbursts in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, religious and political turmoil, social challenges, and many more such incidents and facts have made South Asia vulnerable to an unprecedented combination of shocks and distresses. Scars of the COVID-19 pandemic have slowed down growth adding fire to the fuel. Inflation in South Asia, elevation in food and energy prices, trade restrictions, food insecurity in the region, gender inequality, inequitable growth and distribution, unplanned migration amounting to an unprecedented burden on the informal sector, etc. all demand the building of stronger fiscal and monetary policy buffers for strengthening resilience for the sake of South Asian people. Methodology: R programming language and grammar of graphics have been used to draw an exploratory overview about the sustainability of emerging economies of South Asia with respect to their socio-economic profiles. World development indicators (WDI), OECD national accounts data files, the ILOSTAT database, and the Global Terrorism Database have been used as data sources. Results and Discussion: Data visualization has been used to explore the socio-economic inequality of the emerging nations of South Asia. Maps, Time Series plots, Pie charts, Clustered bar charts have been used to help policymakers plan sustainable enterprises for resilience. Conclusion: Policies adopted by these nations towards ‘Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization’ since the early nineties have witnessed glaring inequalities instead of harnessing the benefits of globalization. India, the largest democracy, reports tremendous social unrest, followed by Pakistan and Sri Lanka, creating a hindrance to their sustainable growth. This is increasing due to dissatisfaction caused by the fall in GDP and consequent income and gender inequality, making the system unable to respond to the causes of good governance.

Keywords: Socio-Economic Inequality, Gross Domestic Product, World Development Indicators

South Asian Economies Bounce Back but Face Fragile Recovery’- this was how the World Bank reacted to the question of prospects the economic growth of South Asia (The World Bank, 2021). Growth of the economy is not only low, but also uneven. Revenue generation is poor mainly due to the factors that millions of workers are employed in informal sector, unemployment rate is alarming and corruption level is mountain high. Job losses, decreasing incomes, gross discrepancies and inequalities, unskilled human capital etc. are some other factors, compelling Hartwig Schafer, World Bank Vice President to comment that “W’ are encouraged to see clear signs of an economic rebound in South Asia, but the pandemic is not yet under control and the recovery remains fragile, calling for vigilance,” for the South Asia Region. But this dismal picture challenging the efforts for sustainable growth in South Asia is not pandemic specific, rather it is the consistent feature of South Asian economy.

Sustainability of Emerging Economies of South Asia demand greater investment for revamping their scarce resources, both material and human and for laying a foundation for a more inclusive and resilient growth to fight back against South Asia’s deep-seated inequalities and vulnerabilities to the acts of intolerance, aggression, inequitable growth of economy and market etc. Unless governments develop clear policies for social insurance to protect informal workers and marginalized castes and classes of people and can develop a spirit of secularism in governance, equitable and robust recovery in socio-economic growth levels and assurance for sustainability are remote possibilities. All efforts and enterprises for equitable and inclusive socio-economic growth will be futile if regional cooperation is not assured, customs restrictions are not made flexible, health, education, and research are not insured, and corruption issues are not addressed to mobilize resource generation. The purpose of this paper is to provide an exploratory overview of the sustainability of emerging economies in South Asia in light of their socioeconomic inequalities.

A framework has been proposed to provide an exploratory overview of the sustainability of emerging economies in South Asia in terms of socioeconomic inequalities.

Data visualisation which is an important component of exploratory data analysis has been beneficial to summarise the main features of the dataset, discover trends or patterns in the dataset, and detect anomalies present in the dataset through iterative visual exploration, which has been used to facilitate insight into complex socioeconomic data. 

Description of the dataset:

To propose a comprehensive framework for the exploratory overview about the sustainability of emerging economies of South Asia with respect to their socio-economic inequalities following datasets as mentioned in Table 1. have been considered.

These datasets include data about real GDP growth, Annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Poverty and Shared Prosperity, People, Environment, Economy, Global Links and terrorist attacks, gender disparity in the employment sector, the participation of women in decision-making, etc.