Can India stay immune enough to combat COVID‐19 pandemic? An economic query

Rakshit, Bijoy; Basishtha, Daisy

The COVID‐19 pandemic has affected different sectors of the economy in an unprecedented way, and this article is an attempt to analyze the economic effect of the outbreak in India. However, before we assess the economic cost associated with the pandemic, we economists fully consider the outbreak as a human tragedy. There has not been any econometric technique that can account the countless human sufferings that the crisis has brought. Through this article, we address several important research questions and demonstrate India's strength to stay immune to combat COVID‐19 pandemic. The research questions are as follows. First, what will be the effect of COVID‐19 on the Indian economy and how does it affect the different sectors of the economy? Second, how does the pandemic affect the bilateral trade relation between India and China? Third, we question the role of the public health system in dealing with the outbreak of the virus in India. This article also presents the growth projection of the Indian economy by different economic agents. We finally conclude the article by mentioning a few policy recommendations for the Indian economy.