A review of studies on poverty in Pakistan: origin, evolution, thematic content and future directions
This study is divided into four major sections. The first tries to put in a political economy perspective the emergence of interest in poverty studies in Pakistan in the early 1970s in the wake of the unraveling of Ayub Khan’s Decade of Development that ultimately resulted in the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh. The second section deals with the qualitative evolution of poverty studies from number-crunching exercises to determine the number of people lying below the poverty line, derived on some arbitrary basis, to greater sophistication in measurement and analysis. The third section discusses the broadening of the thematic content of poverty studies, such as geographical, income and occupational distribution, measurement issues, food poverty, structural adjustment, trade liberalisation, capital flows and remittances, social safety nets and emerging policy issues. The final section looks at the efforts to translate poverty studies into anti-poverty programmes, as well as the likely future directions in which poverty studies on Pakistan are likely to move.