ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has a global negative effect on countries all over the world and several policies were implemented to cushion its effect. However, the effective response was not as expected as several sectors of the economy were affected adversely, leading to loss of jobs, rise in the price of goods and coupled with a decaying health care system, welfare reduced drastically in Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, the study determined the impact of socio-economic shocks on human capital development during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa using a panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) estimation technique. Findings revealed that the impulse response of the combined graph shows that human development index (HDI), gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, unemployment and government debt shows a positive trend to a Cholesky one standard deviation while inflation was positive but had a minimal impact. Also, in the short run, HDI did not respond to COVID-19 but exhibited a negative effect in the long run. The effect of socio-economic shocks to HDI revealed that inflation and government debt had a positive and upward trend while GDP growth rate and unemployment had a negative and downward trend on HDI. Therefore, the study recommends that government should put in place welfare policies that would reduce the negative effect of COVID-19 on human development index as it affects life expectancy, knowledge; and standard of living. Also, efforts should be made to reduce the transmission rate of COVID-19, so that the incidence of locking down the economy a second time would not occur, due to its hostile impact on the income of the economy as well as eroding the income of individual household in the Sub-Saharan African region.
