Poverty reduction figures: World Bank's clarification

Your front page headline in today's Business Recorder, "World Bank differs with Pakistan over poverty reduction figures" misleads your readers. Unfortunately, this is an issue that comes up time and again despite my best efforts to explain.
The World Bank is able to validate the GoP's poverty reduction estimates of over 10% between 2001/02 and 2004/05, when we use the same methodology to adjust for price changes over time as that used consistently by the Government over the past decades. So, the World Bank does not contest in any way the validity of the Government's estimate.
Rather, we take what we believe is an additional step to look beyond the traditional methodology. We wanted to see what would be the estimates if one uses the price adjustments that are imbedded in the survey data themselves rather than the separately collected Consumer Price Index.
Both estimates are similar through 2001/02 but diverge in 2004/05 (please see the table below). This raises the issue of the validity of the price adjustments using the different methods. As it turns out, neither the Government's nor the World Bank's price adjustment are very satisfactory.
The CPI suffers from being collected only in urban areas, thereby leaving out rural areas transport prices, which are unrepresentative of the items on which rural households actually expend. So, one estimate is as good or as bad as the other.
Taken together, they do suggest that the poverty reduction between 2001/2002 may be between 5% and 10% although even that is not very reliable. This complication that gives social scientists gainful employment in arguing the unknowable; it also gives the Government heartburn. Until the 2004/05 data was available, the Government had to endlessly deal with assertions that poverty on its watch was rising in Pakistan, when it was clear to me that it was falling.
Now that the 2004/05 data shows the fall is incontrovertible, the Government now has to answer continuously questions about the credibility of the numbers, which in my view are not in question.
More interesting to me is to accept both numbers as being as valid as the other; and then spend the time and effort saved in figuring out how to reduce poverty even further.
Editor's note: The story was based on the World Bank draft clearly mentioning the date of December 22, 2006. The story also mentioned that the draft was circulated to different government departments/ministries by the WB officials during their meetings last week. BR gave its readers a clear picture on the issue by giving the point of view of the government as well as the World Bank.