Publication: Poverty Assessment : Poverty in Pakistan - Vulnerabilities, Social Caps, and Rural Dynamics

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Date
2002-10-28
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2002-10-28
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World Bank
Abstract
This report is part of an ongoing project to understand poverty, growth, and human development in Pakistan. It argues that if the country does not close its social gap, its long-term ability to grow economically, alleviate poverty, and sustain its debt will be fundamentally compromised. Spanning social, economic, and fiscal difficulties, the country's current predicament is not rooted in a discrete set of policies amenable to rapid rectification, but in structural factors linked very often to issues of governance. It is within this context of a broader failure of policy and implementation that one should understand Pakistan's inability to take sufficient advantage of the growth that it has enjoyed in the past, to attract investment, build enough infrastructure, or to promote adequate advances in social indicators. Over the past decade, stagnating policy and a persistent, even widening, social gap are direct legacies of these failures. As this report suggests, issues of governance, for instance, in the form of the lack of accountability, are at the heart of many of the dificulties encountered in mitigating poverty and broadening access to social services in Pakistan. Neither debt reform nor the mere availability of donor funds is likely to dispel these problems. The strategies and tactics outlined in this report take this into account, emphasizing the need to consider and implement concomitant policies in a comprehensive, mututally reinforcing manner.
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World Bank. 2002. Poverty Assessment : Poverty in Pakistan - Vulnerabilities, Social Caps, and Rural Dynamics. © Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15335 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
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