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Human uplift indicators

Achilles heels of Pakistan's

development efforts: IBRD

KARACHI: The World Bank in its recent assessment of poverty in Pakistan, says that the country made good progress in reducing the proportion of poor people in the 1970s and 1980s.

For example in absolute terms, the number of poor people declined sharply between 1984-85 and 1987-88 and 1990-91 to about 38.7 million.

But progress in another key dimension of poverty human development, measured in terms of the extent to which the population suffers from early mortality, high rate of disease and illiteracy, remains poor by international standards, the report said.

"Pakistan's performance in important human development indicators have been the Achilles heels of the country's development efforts as without sustained gains in health status and accumulation of skills, continued growth in labour productivity and incomes, will not be possible", said Hugo Diaz, Senior Economist of the World Bank for Pakistan.

In spite of the rapid pace of population growth - currently about three percent per year - there has been a sharp decline in the incidence of consumption poverty from 46 percent in 1984-85 to 34 percent in 1990-91, the report said.

The decline in consumption poverty since the mid-1970s is also seen as in the increase in real wages of unskilled urban construction workers, which have risen annually by 1.1 - 2 percent, depending on location.

The data for Punjab, which contains more than 60 percent of Pakistan's rural population, shows 3 percent annual average increase in real wages for regular agricultural workers and 2.1 percent for casual agricultural workers from 1983-84 to 1993-94.

Despite recent progress in human development, Pakistan still lags for behind the averages for all low income economies despite the fact that its GNP per capita of 420 dollars in 1992 was higher than the average for all low income economies of 390 dollars (370 dollars excluding India and China).

A recent World bank study of progress of 71 development countries at reducing infant mortality rates during the 1960-90 ranked Pakistan 50th. The same study placed Pakistan 35th out of 43 countries in terms of progress in increasing enrollment in primary education.

Both the incidence of consumption poverty and human development indicators differ significantly by urban-rural areas and by region-rural areas.

Punjab appears to be considerably poorer than Sindh largely because rural south Punjab has an extremely high incidence of poverty of nearly 50 percent. Evidence on the comparative of the two smaller provinces Balochistan and the NWFP was mixed.

The report contains several recommendation to make current government efforts to address poverty more effectively and to improve human development indicators.

It stressed that the government should deepen its economic and institutional reforms and it should seek to achieve sustained GDP growth on the order achieved in the 1980s - six percent annually.

As Pakistan can no longer rely on some of the traditional factors that supported rapid growth in the 1980s, such as private transfers from abroad and expansion of irrigation, it must enhance the efficiency of resource use in both its manufacturing and agricultural sectors. For the purpose the government must deepen its economic reforms programme and should also improve governance and the quality of public administration at all levels.

The government should expand its social safety net by including poor throughout its two main income transfer programmes - the Zakat and Ushr, Bait-ul-Maal - and by shifting expenditures away from the government subsidies that are not meant for poor population.

Moreover, the government should develop a long-term strategy for the financing of basic social services, while the government was committed to providing larger allocations to basic social services.-PPI