Over the years, most developing countries have failed to collect enough revenues to finance their budgets. As a result, they face the problem of twin deficits and are relying on public external and domestic debt to finance their developmental activities. NGOs and anti-globalisation movements have propagated the view that instead of reducing poverty public debt has increased the miseries of the poor. The current study examines the consequences of public debt for economic growth and poverty regarding selected South Asian countries, i.e., Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for the period 1975-2010. It develops an empirical model that incorporates the role of public debt into growth equations and the model is extended to incorporate the effects of debt on poverty. The model is estimated by using standard panel data estimation methodologies. The results shows that although public debt has a negative impact on economic growth, neither public external debt nor external debt servicing has a significant relationship with income inequality, suggesting that public external debt is as good/bad for poor as it is for rich. However, domestic debt has a positive relationship with economic growth and a negative relationship with the GINI coefficient, indicating that domestic debt is pro-poor.

Human capital plays pivotal role for sustainable economic Growth. As different growth theories suggest the role of human capital as a significant for growth process. The concept of human capital in economic literature defined broadly by including education, health, training, migration, and other investments that enhance an individual’s productivity. However, the growth economists that have incorporated human capital in the growth studies, paid greater attention on analysing the impact of education on economic growth, while ignoring the role of health human capital. It is only in very recent times that studies have started looking at health and tried to estimate the relationship between health status and economic growth. There exists a two-way relationship between improved health and economic growth. Health and other forms of human and physical capital increases the per capita GDP by increasing productivity of existing resources coupled with resource accumulation and technical change. Furthermore, some part of this increased income is spent on investment in human capital, which results in further per capita growth. According to Fogel (1994), approximately one third of GDP of Britain between 1790 and 1980 is the outcome of improvements in health especially improvement in nutrition, public health, and medical care facilities and these improved health facilities should be considered as labour enhancing technical change.

Over the years Pakistan has failed to collect enough revenues for financing of its budget. Consequently, the problem of twin deficits emerged and to finance the developmental activities government has to rely on public external and domestic debt. The positive effects of public debt relate to the fact that in resource-starved economies debt financing if done properly leads to higher growth and adds to their capacity to service and repay public debt. The negative effects work through two main channels—i.e., ―Debt Overhang‖ and ―Crowding Out‖ effects. The present study examines the consequences of public debt for economic growth and investment in Pakistan for the period 1972-2009. It develops a hybrid model that explicitly incorporates the role of public debt in growth equations. As the some variables are I (1) and other are I (0) so Autoregressive Distributed Lag(ARDL) technique has been applied to estimate the model. Study finds that public external debt has negative relationship with per capita GDP and investment confirming the existence of ―Debt Overhang effect‖. However, due to insignificant relationships of debt servicing with investment and per capita GDP, the existence of the crowding out hypothesis could not be confirmed. Similarly, domestic debt has a negative relationship with investment and per capita GDP. In other words, it seems to have crowded out private investment. JEL classification: H63, O43, E22, C22 Keywords: Public Debt, Economic Growth, Investment, ARDL

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Asia is recognized as one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change on the planet. With approximately 60 per cent of world's population residing in Asia, this phenomenon presents serious concerns for policymakers in the region. The present study analyses the impacts of climate change on economic growth for selected Asian countries during the period 1972-2009. A growth model has been developed by incorporating temperature and precipitation as proxies for climate change in the production function and a fixed effect model (FEM) and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) have been used to estimate the model. The results reveal that economic growth is negatively affected by changes in temperature, precipitation and population growth whereas urbanization and human development stimulates economic growth. The results also indicate that agriculture is the most vulnerable sector to climate change and manufacturing is the least affected sector.