ABSTRACT
The six country- specific chapters in Part II of this volume have highlighted a range of social sector measures across the South Asian region. There have been innovative education and health policies, and significantly a plethora of social welfare initiatives including employment programmes, pension programmes and family-related benefits. This chapter reviews the social sector expenditure in these (and other) areas for six 1 countries in South Asia in order to draw conclusions about the current nature of the welfare state in South Asia. Although expenditure as a share of fiscal budget is significant in most countries, the actual expenditure as a share of GDP remains quite low. This translates into low per capita expenditures and calls into question the extent to which South Asian states can indeed be called welfare states. This critical issue of low per capita expenditures needs to be resolved against a plethora of challenges: the structural lack of fiscal space at a given moment in time; potential inflationary effects of increased expenditures; and the politics of juggling various aspects of redistributive equity with an emerging social discourse based on multiple objectives and political contestations in the region.
