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This paper examines Sri Lankan men’s labor market outcomes when their wives emigrate to work, leaving the husbands and their children at home in Sri Lanka — the effects of maternal migration on the husbands’ labor market decisions. We used nationally representative cross-sectional data and historical migration rates at the community level as an instrument for maternal migration in two-stage least squares estimations. We find that maternal migration reduces the husbands’ labor supply. Husbands are more likely to exit the labor market and become unemployed; the employed are less likely to moonlight and have lower wages, and those that exit the labor market are more likely to become stay-at-home dads. Using a second instrument, an indicator of whether a community has foreign-employment agencies, we also confirmed our main results. Our findings indicate that policies that aim to promote female migration as an exogenous income source may fall short if they do not address the effects of the husbands’ labor market decisions.

Though SAARC has the stated goal of an economic union and a common currency, after a quarter of a century, these remain distant goals as political tensions between India and Pakistan have hindered any real progress on a regional scale. Barriers to trade and factor mobility are high in the region as a whole, though considerable liberalisation has been achieved through various bilateral agreements involving India and some of its neighbours. The conventional economic conditions for a common currency are also currently absent as patterns of shocks are non-synchronised, trade links are weak and factor mobility much constrained. Deeper intraregional economic integration requires much more comprehensive trade and investment liberalisation among member nations. While the political conditions for a single currency are unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future, steps towards closer monetary cooperation through a South Asian Monetary System — building on the existing SAARCFINANCE network — may provide an institutional framework for enhancing regional integration. However, such cooperation will have to be conceived as a component of a sustainable transitional strategy which commits to a serious programme of deeper trade liberalisation to facilitate greater integration with the rest of the world, and most importantly, with East Asia.

Using the aggregate financial stability index (AFSI) which measures the gradual progression and changes in financial market stability, this paper empirically evaluates the impact of financial and economic integration on financial stability in South Asian countries using time-series data for the period 1980–2012. Auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) Bounds testing approach to cointegration is applied to ensure long-run relationship between variables. Bound F-test results confirm the long-run relationship between selected variables. The estimated results show that economic and financial integration has exerted a significant negative effect on financial stability in long run.

This study empirically investigates a monetary policy reaction function for South Asian economies by incorporating financial stability as an additional policy objective in the central bank’s loss function. Empirical results are estimated by applying auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration and vector autoregressive (VAR) approach using time-series data of five South Asian countries, namely, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Estimated results indicate that monetary policy significantly reacts to the level of financial stability in all countries. The result further suggests that central banks would tighten monetary policy if output gap widens and exchange rate depreciate. In addition, central banks of Pakistan and India do not respond significantly to inflation gap.

This study looked at the possibility that South Asian countries’ financial prosperity may lessen poverty. The data presented in this research show that between 1990 and 2019, economic development directly led to a decline in poverty in South Asian nations. Remittances reduce poverty, but financial growth has a huge influence. The model result suggests that financial development strongly affects poverty reduction, regardless of the econometric methodology. The results demonstrated that whereas remittances increase poverty levels for men and women, economic development significantly reduces them. Poverty was decreased considerably by variables such as economic development, foreign direct investment and commercial openness. As a result of these expenditures, the South Asian population was shown to be more vulnerable to poverty. The South Asian population was more susceptible to poverty due to these outlays. The results also refute earlier research suggesting that rising poverty may result from financial instability.