Suchergebnisse

It is sometimes said that "national planning will simply have
no meaning if it completely ignores the economic disparities between the
two wings and fails to evolve a sensible pattern of regional planning"2.
The lack of much essential data on a regional basis, however, renders
any precise estimate of the relative growth rates almost impossible.
Data either are not available or are inadequate on such important
variables as production, income, consumption and trade, so that even a
correct evaluation of past development efforts is not possible. The
implications of such a situation for future planning are not difficult
to understand. In this article an attempt is made to estimate the
absorption of specified commodities in East and West Pakistan
separately3. This will indicate the pattern of consumption and also give
a rough idea about the growth rate of the two wings. With this purpose
in view, quantity indices of absorption are prepared for each wing
separately, taking data on availability of goods and prices from the
Institute's monograph on Inflation. The quantity indi¬ces, however, are
not of course strictly comparable with national income estimates because
of the difference in coverage of the two series. National income data
include government, services, trade, etc., while the quantity indices
cover only specified goods available for each region.

In this note an attempt is made to extend the wholesale price
index prepared in the Institute of Development Economics1 to 1960-61.
That index, which was computed for the East and West wings separately
and for the whole of Pakistan, covered a period of nine years from
1951-52 to 1959-60 (July-June) with 1951-52 as the base year. The West
Pakistan index covers 35 commodities while the commodities included in
East Pakistan index number 25. The weights for each wing are derived
from the net quantity available to final users in each year. It should
be remembered that this whole¬sale price index is not an all-purpose
general price index; its coverage and scope are limited. It is a measure
of annual wholesale price changes for certain goods in East and in West
Pakistan. Further details of the index may be found in the monograph
cited in footnotel. The present index for 1960-61 is computed by the
Laspeyres formula alone as it was not possible to calculate the Paasche
index without information on quantities available during 1960-61.2 For
the same reason it is not possible to extend the analysis of quantity
indices previously presented for both wings of Pakistan.3