Bashir Ahmad Khilji

Sectoral Decomposition of Changes in Pakistan’s Poverty: The New Interface

Propoor economic and regional policies focus on increasing the economic returns to the productive factors that the poor possesses. The objective of the study is to examine the impact of intrasectoral gains/losses and intersectoral shifts in population on aggregate changes in poverty in Pakistan. The result shows that the urban and rural sectors contributed to the increase in aggregate poverty, though the “interaction effect” and the “population shift effect” alleviated poverty, the overall impact was negligible.

Measuring pro-poor sectoral analysis for Pakistan: trickle down?

The study aims to establish a pro-poor growth index called the ‘Poverty Equivalent Growth Rate’, which considers both the extent of sectoral growth and the benefits reaching the poor in Pakistan, using 21 household surveys between 1964 and 2011. The result reveals that despite the positive signs in agriculture growth, the growth process may not be classifiable as pro-poor. The result points out that compared with the non-poor, the poor overall benefited less from the revitalisation of agricultural processes; however, the trend was reversed during 2002 to 2011 when the poverty equivalent growth rates are higher than the growth rate of industry, manufacturing, commodity producing and services value added, which shows sectoral growth favours the poor more than non-poor in Pakistan.

Growth, Employment, Exports and Wagner’s Law: Evidence from Pakistan’s Agriculture Sector (1960–2009)

The objective of this study is to empirically examine the relationship between growth, employment, exports and their impact on gross national expenditure (as a percentage of agriculture GDP), specifically in the context of Pakistan’s agriculture sector by using the Bound Testing approach. Data sets from 1960–2009 are taken for time series analysis. The analysis demonstrates that, in the long-run, Wagner’s Law does not hold in Pakistan’s agriculture sector, as agriculture growth is negatively correlated with the share of agriculture expenditure; while, in the short-run, Wagner’s law does hold, as it supports the hypothesis. Agricultural employment tends to be a significant negative correlation with the agricultural expenditure in the long-run. However, these results disappear in the short-run. Agricultural raw material exports have a significant and positive impact on agriculture expenditures both in the short- and long-run.