The poverty elephant

Undiscussed elephants in the room do not get much bigger than that labelled poverty. No government of the last three decades has been willing or perhaps more importantly able, to put a figure on the numbers of people living in poverty in Pakistan. Part of the problem has to do with complexity and the shifting nature of poverty — it is a shape-changing moving target. Poverty is constantly evolving and it is today recognised as being multidimensional — a family of elephants of different sizes with some permanently resident and others transient, in the room periodically. That said it does not excuse this or any government the task, indeed duty and responsibility, of quantifying and objectifying poverty in its many manifestations.

The last time there was anything close to a government-driven evaluation and enumeration was in 2016 when figures for 2013 were released. They were based on a poverty bottom line of Rs3,030 per month ($27.41 at current exchange rates) translating into around 59 million out of a population that then was estimated (pre-census) as about 190m. Broken down that is about 90 cents US a day and clearly unsustainable. International poverty lines are generally closer to $2 per day which when laid across today’s population indicates that 60 per cent of Pakistanis are poor.

Most of the aid received by Pakistan is in some ways designed to reduce poverty, yet there is scant evidence that it has done so, and government policies are at least nominally designed to reduce or alleviate policy yet with few exceptions they do not. Similar poverty reduction activity in India and China has both seen dramatic declines in levels of real poverty. Today in Pakistan the focus is on redistributive policies that aim to reduce inequality, but this is doing more harm than good opine some analysts as good intent falls afoul of poor governance and corruption and seemingly without exception poverty-reduction initiatives die a death whenever a programme falls into political hands. Those run in collaboration with the private sector seem to fare better. The real key to poverty reduction is employment, and who holds the key to more jobs? The government.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd, 2018.

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