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Rural poverty dynamics in Pakistan

A close look at the data on poverty levels and trends in Pakistan for the last five decades leads to two broad conclusions. First, poverty reduction has not been sustainable rather it has fluctuated remarkably. Second, a large proportion of the population has been found around the poverty line, and any micro and/or macro shock (positive or negative) has pushed it into poverty or pulled it out of it. This dynamism of poverty, however, has been overlooked in the poverty debate, which in general has focused on the levels and trends in poverty based on the cross-sectional datasets such as the Household Integrated Economic Surveys (HIES) carried out almost regularly by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS). Poverty dynamics have been presented in this viewpoint for rural areas only because the urban sample was included in the panel survey first time in the 2010 round.

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