Relative poverty in Pakistan an estimation from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (1984-85)

Abstract

This paper operationalises the concept of relative poverty in the context of Pakistan. The exercise is carried out both at the national and the provincial level. Besides an estimation of the incidence of poverty at the aggregate level, the paper provides a cross-sectional comparison of poverty in different socio-economic groups in the four provinces of Pakistan. The paper is organised in six sections. After the introduction, Section 2 gives a brief theoretical reflection on the concept and measurement of relative poverty. This section also describes the methodology followed in this paper. Section 3 presents poverty estimates for the country as a whole and Section 4 gives the results for the four provinces of Pakistan. This section also examines the relationship between the findings at the national level and the provincial level. Section 5 presents a brief comparison of high poverty groups across provinces. Some concluding remarks are given at the end in Section 6. -from Author