On the last day of the 26th annual general meeting and conference of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), economists and researchers read out their papers on different topics.
Talking about, "Inter-District Inequalities in Social Service Delivery: A Rationalised Approach Towards Funds Disbursement," Muhammad Usman Sikander and Syed Ahsan Ahmad Shah stated that lack of access to basic services such as health, education and physical infrastructure made it unlikely for the poor to break the vicious poverty cycle.
The current scenario clearly reflects that as the distance of a district from the provincial capital increases, inequality in access to basic services increases. This result shows that resources are not being devolved effectively from the core to the periphery, they added.
"The Punjab Government needs to develop a more holistic methodology for providing funds, where they are needed the most. Our research identifies the districts that have poor access to public services, they said. To meet their needs, the state needs to ensure that scarce resources are allocated to districts that require them the most. Moreover for efficient coverage, the Government must provide social service that is currently under-provided in that district.
Abid A. Burki and Mushtaq A. Khan in their presentations examined the nature of spatial inequality and scope of geographic concentration of manufacturing industries in Pakistan. They said that the economic geography does matter in Pakistan. With few exceptions, the most highly concentrated districts in large-scale manufacturing employment are clustered around metropolitan cities of Karachi and Lahore, and their surrounding districts.
Abid Burki said that in most concentrated industries, it is critical for the industry to spread out to reach to the final consumers or the suppliers. On the other hand, the demand for least concentrated industries is diversified across many districts, due to which they have substantial raw concentration, eg, iron and steel, footwear and tobacco, but their employment is distributed across few large plants, eg, iron and steel, footwear, tobacco and rubber.
He said that a range of policy instruments have already been tried in Pakistan as well as other developing countries, eg, tax holidays, building infrastructure in industrial estates, free trade zones, export processing zones, etc. However, it goes without saying that there is no evidence of their systematic success or failure from any country. Therefore, it is advised that more empirical research need to be conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the past policies so that we are able to conclude that under what circumstances these programs and policies are likely to succeed.
In presentations on the topic of "changing profile of development: a historical study of the Punjab from 1961 to 2008", the researchers and economists said that it had been said that the Social Action Program (SAP) adopted in 1993 by the Pakistan's People's Party (PPP) aimed at improving the living standards by investing in education, basic health, family planning, rural access to water supply and sanitation among other areas of development. Despite the good intentions, the program could not realise sufficient improvements in the social indicators, however it did accomplish some milestones. The high growth in primary enrolments for females (8.6 percent per annum) and males (7.7 percent per annum) in the 1990s is attributed to the Social Action Programme, they added.
During PPP government, spending on education peaked at 2.7 percent of the GDP and that on health was 0.8 percent in 1996-97. The Muslim League alternated short governance regimes with the Peoples Party in the 1990s, although no government could effectively follow their economic strategies, the allocation of expenditures on the social sectors of health and education was always greater in the PPP's regimes.
Pakistan's third military coup led by General Pervaiz Musharraf followed in 1999, and the economy continued to stumble on a slow growth path. However, everything changed after September 2001. Pakistan became an ally of the United States in the war against terror and as a result economic sanctions were removed, loans were rescheduled and aid started to flow in once again. The economy turned around as growth rates started to rise, the fiscal deficit reached its lowest in two decades, exports crossed the $10 billion mark and remittances started flowing in. However, there was no clear strategy to sustain this growth, and eventually the growth rates started to taper.
Rashida Haq, Azkar Ahmed and Saima Shafique in their papers on the topic, 'Variation in quality of life within Punjab: evidence from MICS 2007-08' stated that the top nine districts were rated, as 'good' quality of life located in six major cities of Punjab including Lahore, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Faisalabad and Sailkot. The second quality of life categorised, as 'fair' has one major city and out of nine districts seven are located in central
Punjab, while two are in north Punjab, ie Sargodha, Sahiwal, Chakwal and Attock. The third quartile is termed as 'medium' quality of life where 23 percent population is residing, majority of which are from south Punjab. The bottom quartile is categorised as 'poor' where districts from west Punjab are dominated, ie Mianwali, Jhang and Muzafferghar etc. Intra districts variation in quality of life quantified by Tehsils is quite considerable.
Some district like Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan and Jhelum observed significant variation in quality of life in their respective Tehsils. Finally, the study has identified Tehsils ranked as 'poor' quality of life within each district as target for special resource allocation within Medium Term Development Framework.