Consumption-based poverty in Pakistan fell sharply between 1990 and 2010, according to official poverty data (Government of Pakistan 2014). Nonetheless, the mainstream narrative on poverty reduction in the country remains highly contested. Key sources of evidence show improvements that are commensurate with a decrease in poverty, while others raise doubts over this decrease. The policy space in which poverty reduction is debated is also highly polarised, as revealed in the positions of multiple stakeholders involved in policy, research and civil society in Pakistan who were interviewed for this study. According to many of the key informants interviewed in 2015, the purported progress is incommensurate with wider macroeconomic and political conditions in the country as well as with trends in other dimensions of well-being. The drivers of progress, from their perspective, have also not favoured the poor.

Our analysis of official poverty data shows how the estimates may be biased – both owing to the politics of measurement and due to technical flaws in household surveys, mainly in the consumption module and the sampling frame, as well as technical flaws in the official measurement of poverty in particular the adjustment of the official national poverty line using the Consumer Price Index (CPI). As a result, it is surprisingly difficult to reach any definitive conclusion as to whether poverty reduced between 1990 and 2010 and if the stated progress is real. The paper discusses the implications of the high levels of contestation over official poverty data as well as the need to better understand the types of evidence the government must produce to defend its policies to alleviate poverty, and for key stakeholders to accept these as credible. It also identifies the steps that the government is taking to depoliticise the measurement and analysis of poverty – in and of itself a sign of progress.

Reference

Government of Pakistan 2014, ‘Pakistan Economic Survey 2013/14’, Government of Pakistan, Islamabad. 

*A version of this study has been published as Khan, A.  Naveed, A. Samman, E. Sarwar, E.B. and Hoy, C. 2015, ‘Progress under Scrutiny: Poverty Reduction in Pakistan’, Case Study Report, Overseas Development Institute, UK, <https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/9904.pdf>.