ISLAMABAD, Nov 13: The data on the basis of which poverty line may be drawn is not reliable in Pakistan.
Senior Research Demographer at Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) Dr G. M. Arif said Tuesday while speaking on the second day of a national workshop on “Poverty Analysis, Monitoring and Evaluation.”
To-date no reliable estimates are available because household surveys are not very helpful in this regard,” he remarked. Organised by PIDE in collaboration with the World Bank, the workshop was attended by researchers, academicians, policy-makers and students from all over Pakistan.
Dr Arif defined the poverty line as when one and more persons fail to attain a level of wellbeing (usually material) that is deemed to constitute a reasonable minimum by the standards of that society.
In this context he raised three questions. How do we assess individual wellbeing or welfare?; At what level of measured wellbeing do we say that a person is not poor?; How do we aggregate indicators of wellbeing into a measure of poverty.
Dr Arif said the widely accepted yardstick for estimating the poverty line was the calorie intake method but at present researchers use different threshold levels for the minimum calorie intake requirement.
He further said, “In case of developing countries, poverty line is meant to be taken as absolute measure of poverty because it tells us that someone below the determined is deemed to be poor.
For this purpose, Dr Arif said, the nutritional requirements of a household should be determined. Elaborating further on calorie intake method, he said sex was very important since male and female require different doses of calories per day. Furthermore, factor of rural/urban differentials should be taken into account, he added.
Talking about the issues concerning the estimation of poverty line in Pakistan, Dr Arif said, “there exists a lot of confusion. Different estimates for poverty have been reported by different organizations, particularly estimates of poverty in 90s are not comparable.”
Unfortunately, Pakistan has no official poverty line so that poverty trend can be analysed. He emphasised the need for one criterion for comparison among different estimates to see trends in poverty line.
The second issue he highlighted is the inclusion of inflation in poverty line. He stressed that poverty line estimates should be adjusted for changes in prices because prices change from time to time and affect the estimates of poverty line and results might come out different and confusing.