Govt to release poverty index figures after hiatus of several years
ISLAMABAD: In order to implement the IMF condition under the $3 billion Standby (SBA) Arrangement, the caretaker government is all set to release quarterly GDP growth figures including revising the provisional growth figure and estimating the Multidimensional Poverty in Pakistan next week.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in Pakistan was released in 2016 and after pause of several years then caretaker government had now made up its mind to release the MPI figure probably in coming week. The poverty data on the basis of 2019-20 would be released with expectation the MPI level might witnessed decrease from 38.8 percent to over 30 percent.
The National Accounts Committee is scheduled to meet next week for calculating the GDP growth rate on quarterly basis for the first quarter (July-Sept) period and will also release the finalised figure of the last financial year 2022-23. The provisional figure showed the GDP growth rate stood at 0.29 percent. It is all set to be revised downward but it might be kept slightly positive.
“The quarterly growth figure will be released under the IMF’s condition” said the official and added that the quarterly growth was released once during the last tenure of PMLN-led regime from 2013 to 2018 but then this practice got discontinued when the GDP growth was found slowing down. Now it is yet to see how the quarterly growth figure will be done on permanent basis and without any interruptions. Pakistan had found on the basis of the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) survey for the 2014/15 period, the country’s Multidimensional Poverty Index stands at 0.197. This indicates that poor people in Pakistan experience 19.7 percent of the deprivations that would be experienced if all people were deprived in all indicators. Secondly, it must be noted that the MPI is a product of two essential components: the poverty “headcount” and the “intensity” of deprivation. Using the same data from the 2014/15 PSLM survey, the country’s multidimensional poverty “headcount ratio” was estimated at 38.8 percent of the population.
This means that 38.8 percent of the population of Pakistan are poor according to the MPI. The average intensity of deprivation, which reflects the share of deprivation which each poor person experiences on average, is 50.9 percent. The UNDP Pakistan had stated that there are stark regional disparities in poverty across Pakistan. The proportion of people identified as multidimensionally poor in urban areas is significantly lower than in rural areas – 9.4 percent and 54.6 percent, respectively. Further heterogeneities were found when looking at results at the provincial level. In 2014/15, MPI headcount ratios ranged from 31.4 percent in Punjab (with an intensity of 48.4 percent), to 71.2 percent in Balochistan (with an average intensity of 55.3 percent). With respect to the percentage which each of the 15 indicators contributes to overall multidimensional poverty in Pakistan, the greatest contribution to national poverty derives from years of schooling (29.7 percent), followed by a lack of access to healthcare facilities (19.8 percent) and child school attendance (10.5 percent). If aggregated by dimensions, the greatest contribution to poverty stems from educational deprivation (42.8 percent), followed by living standards (31.5 percent) and healthcare (25.7 percent).
