ISLAMABAD, Mar 13 (APP): The World Bank Group in its
recently published report “Pakistan Country Snapshot” has said
that the country has made impressive progress in reducing
absolute poverty and improving shared prosperity.
“The percentage of the population below the national
poverty rate has fallen from 34.7 per cent in fiscal year 2002
to an estimated 12.4 per cent in FY2011,” the report said.
It said that Pakistan had already achieved the first
Millennium Development Goal (MDG) by more than halving between
1991 and 2011 the proportion of people whose income is less
than $1.25 a day.
Furthermore, growth in the real per capita consumption
of the bottom 40 percent was a respectable 3 per cent
between 2006 and 2011, it noted.
The report said poverty reduction had been stronger in the
traditionally poorer provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Sindh,
where its rates were now indistinguishable from those in Punjab.
“Poverty remains much more prevalent in Balochistan,
however, where a sizable portion of residents are nomadic and
live in remote and conflict areas.”
The report, however, said that despite this progress, a
large portion of the population remained vulnerable to falling
back into poverty.
“Although Pakistan’s recent gains in poverty were rapid,
they remain fragile, in part because many households remain
clustered near the poverty line,” the report added.
It said that an estimated 23 million people – 13
per cent of the population – lived on an amount between $1.25
and $1.50 per day, meaning that small reductions in
consumption could greatly increase poverty rates.
The report suggested that efforts were needed to
improve poverty monitoring and policy evaluation.
“Poverty measurement can be institutionalized in part
through more independent and regularized poverty assessments
that link measurements to other human development indicator
data base,” it proposed.
It said another needed step was establishment of a
constructive partnership between official authorities, donors
and academics to promote high quality and timely measurement
of poverty and shared prosperity, analysis and programme
evaluation.
Similarly additional data collected at the mauza or
tehsil level could be used to generate more detailed estimates
to help policymakers better locate poor pockets within
districts, it added.