International Business Paradigm in the Post-Pandemic Era

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the deadliest pandemics ever encountered by human civilization. However, the unconquerable human resilience and the digital duo of mobile and internet led to a victory over this dreadful pandemic. This chapter initially focuses on India to illustrate the necessity of literacy in a pandemic. Later, the chapter accepts the hypothesis that business and trade is the engine of growth and verifies that in such dire conditions whether digital business and trade acted as a buffer. Both the aforementioned aspects are quantitatively verified. This chapter uses two regression equations with robust standard errors to examine COVID-19 and literacy. Two dependent variables are population recovered to population tested and completely vaccinated to the total population, and both the population density and rate of literacy have been taken as two independent variables. Furthermore, this chapter also has analyzed the relevant data of 137 countries and has emphasized the fact how digitalization has acted as a buffer and kept business and trade going in a “no man's land.”