Suchergebnisse

The rural areas of developing countries are not only
underdeveloped in terms of their physical infrastructure but also
contain a larger proportion of the poor population as compared to the
urban areas reflecting the underdeveloped social infrastructure. A
majority of the rural population does not have access to the limited
social services and amenities, such as safe drinking water, education,
electricity, and health services, and is thus struggling for survival.
After the Second World War, some of the East Asian countries launched
poverty alleviation programmes and attempted to reduce unemployment and
underemployment by promoting the ruralbased industries. Their experience
reveals that the rural economy cannot grow only through agriculture
grOWth. Sustainable growth requires the creation of non-farm job
opportunities that will raise the level of employment and income and,
consequently, the standard of living. In the absence of such activities,
farm unemployment increases and a large proportion of the jobless labour
force tends to seek jobs in the urban informal sector, which creates
problems of slums, poverty, and crime in the urban areas. Comprehensive
field surveys are generally required to identify the areas which lie in
the lower strata of the development ladder and to suggest effective
targeting of welfare measures for alleviating poverty.

Pakistan's economic history has seen many turnarounds since
independence. The country emerged on the world-map with few
manufacturing industries, very little educated and skilled labour, a
limited endowment of financial resources, and the enormous problem of
resettlement of refugees. In addition to this, political conflicts with
India caused two wars and resulted in the separation of East Pakistan.
However, the country's economic performance has been remarkable. This
book reviews Pakistan's economic performance over a period of 47 years,
from 1947 to 1993, and traces the history and development of various
sectors of Pakistan's economy with the help of time-series data on key
variables. Trends in these variables are depicted in graphs. The
background data are provided in the 58 appendix tables at the end of the
book. In each chapter, Pakistan's position in the world economy is
judged by a comparative analysis in relation to other
countries.

The process of urbanisation is fed by the migration of people
from the rural to the urban areas. Among the several reasons why people
move to cities, the following are considered to be the most important:
modernisation in agriculture and the resultant labour displacement,
rapid industrial development, and concentration of land in a few hands;
also the lack of non-agricultural jobs in the rural areas and the
increase in population. The immigrants face a different environment in
the cities and generally find it difficult to adjust to the setting with
a new set of social relations. The poor unskilled labour coming from the
rural areas to settle in the cities at any cost finds its way to the
squalor of the slum areas. The resultant population pressure forces the
people of these areas to face severe problems not only in terms of
inadequate wages and incomes but also in terms of their relations with
their spouses, children, friends, relatives, and neighbours. In the slum
areas thus growing, it is not possible for the planning and development
authorities, despite their extensive efforts, to provide to all the
inhabitants such social services and amenities as education and health
facilities, parks, playgrounds, and safe drinkingwater. Left without the
amenities of developed urban areas, these inhabitants struggle for
survival.

This paper focuses on two aspects. First, it looks at the
trends in female employment at the federal level over a period of six
years, from 1983 to 1989, based on data from the Federal Government's
Civil Servants Census Reports, using three years, 1983, 1986, 1989. The
second aspect of the paper is to highlight the fact that not all the
information that is collected is published gender-wise. This is very
important from the point of view of working women as it can also have
strong policy implications with regard to the advancement of women for
which the Government has set up a separate ministry. The ignorance of
the Ministry of Women's Development about this aspect, that is, of
available unpublished information, is surprising. The paper is
structured as follows. After a brief discussion of data and methodology,
the results are presented in Section 2. Section 3 discusses the data
which are collected but not published at the disaggregate level which
has adverse implications for women employees at the policy level. The
conclusions and policy recommendations are presented in the final and
fourth section of this paper. The data used in this paper are taken from
the Government of Pakistan (1983, 1986, 1989). The statistics reported
in these reports are classified by service groups into Secretariat,
Attached Departments, Subordinate Offices, Other Offices, and in the
Autonomous/Semi-Autonomous bodies by Basic Pay Scale (BPS) and gender.
The Censuses show that for these years no female employee of the regular
civil service is reported in BPS-22 for all the categories, and also
none is reported in BPS 21 in 1989. Therefore, for this analysis, we
group the female employees as between BPS 16–20 instead of BPS
16–22.

The 1990s have seen poverty reduction become the overarching
objective of all economic development. In countries where poverty is
largely a rural phenomenon it is obvious that considerations of poverty
focus on improving rural welfare. The welfare impact of credit use in
the process of agricultural development is generally not explicitly
documented in the literature.1 The emphasis is generally on "the
requisites for development of rural financial policies that facilitate
rural growth" [Desai and Mellor (1993)]. Welfare gains arise from this
growth through net gains in income from the relaxation of the capital
constraint leading to higher input use and resultant higher output, in
addition to increasing the risk bearing capacity of households thus
leading to the adoption of new technology and diversification of crop
mix and income sources. Additionally welfare gains can also arise from
credit use directly through improved and more efficient consumption
smoothing. Pakistan is predominantly rural and poor. Attempts over
several decades, by successive governments, at developing the
institutional credit market in Pakistan have failed miserably. The rural
credit market continues to be fragmented and beset by distortions.
Credit policy aimed at improving access of the small landowners and the
poor ended up being diverted to the powerful large landowners. This
misuse is widely documented in Malik (1989, 1990 and 1999). Badly
designed policies coupled with a weak institutional structure and
rampant corruption called into question the very basis for using credit
markets as a means for poverty alleviation.

By highlighting the lack of rigorous evidence and calling for
a greater understanding of the interaction of the two processes, a
recent study [Nelson et al. (1997)] has called into question the strong
perception that poverty is both a consequence as well as a cause of
resource degradation.1 This perception which is widely held is strongly
evident in the writings of the multilateral development agencies such as
the World Bank (1990) and IFAD (1992) and exists despite extensive
reviews which indicate that the short- and long-term implications of
land degradation are not very clear [see Scherr and Yadav (1995)].
Similarly, while knowledge about poverty is expanding rapidly, thanks in
large parts to the massive international focus and resources brought to
bear on its understanding in the past
ten.........................

In spite of substantial growth in agricultural GDP in the
1990s, rural poverty rates in Pakistan did not decline. This paper
explores the reasons for this lack of correlation between increases in
agricultural production and poverty reduction through an analysis of
growth linkages using a 2001-02 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM)-based
semi-inputoutput model. Model simulations indicate that expansion of
traditional crop agriculture can significantly benefit rural poor
farmers. However, because of skewed distribution of land and earnings
from land, landless agricultural labourers and the rural non-farm poor
(who, together, account for 61 percent of the rural poor) do not benefit
directly from growth in the crop sector. In the absence of a change in
the structure of rural incomes and employment, further measures will
likely be needed for rapid poverty reduction in Pakistan, including
greater efforts to boost the livestock sector, expansion of the rural
non-farm economy (in addition to agricultural growth-induced linkage
effects), and targeted interventions to the poorest rural
households.

There is ample evidence that poverty, which declined rapidly
in Pakistan in the 1980s, has returned in the 1990s [Amjad and Kemal
(1997); Ali and Tahir (1999); Jafri (1999); Qureshi and Arif (2001)].
Consequently large number of Pakistanis, more than one-third of the
total population, live currently far below what can reasonably be
regarded as a decent standard of living. Poverty has generally been
higher in rural areas than in urban areas. This gap could not be bridged
overtime; still the greatest degree of poverty is found in the
countryside. To address rural poverty, policy-makers have long been
looking to the growth potential of the farm sector of the rural economy.
Non-agricultural activities in rural areas have received little
attention. This neglect, however, may be socially costly. It has been
shown in several recent empirical studies that nonfarm activities occupy
an important place in rural economies throughout the developing world
[Hazell and Haggblade (1993); Adams and He (1995); Bakht (1996); Sen
(1996); Lanjouw (1999)]. They expand quite rapidly in response to
agriculture development, and therefore merit special attention in the
design of strategies concerning poverty alleviation in rural
areas.

Information serves as an essential intermediate input in
decision-making for any business process. It is an essential requirement
not only for effective and efficient management but also for medium and
long term planning. In this era of technological advancement the rapid
growth of information flow has contributed significantly in the
expansion of business, commercial, industrial, financial, educational
and research organisations. Electronic communication provides the
ability to overcome many organisational problems. In recent years, an
easy and inexpensive access to information through the Internet and
e-mail has created an atmosphere of strong competition among
organisations. In this competitive environment, the organisations need
an efficient, productive and competent internal set-up based on a
well-informed workforce. In the absence of effective co-ordination, the
expansion of an organisation may result in inter-group conflicts,
unhealthy bureaucratic activities, and various complexities in
decision-making [Telleen (1996)]. This applies even more to
organisations in developing countries such as Pakistan that are in need
of efficient ways to improve governance and enhance institutional
reforms.

This paper attempts to explain female time allocation for
rural women in selected districts of Pakistan. This topic is of
considerable importance for several reasons. At an academic leveL the
fact that the female labour force participation decision and the hours
worked are jointly determined raises interesting problems of modelling
and econometric estimation in taking account of the selectivity bias
thus introduced into OLS estimation. At the policy level, an insight
into the factors influencing female labour force participation is
extremely important in a developing country such as Pakistan where the
majority of females do not participate in mainstream economic
activities. The objective of this study is to determine the factors
affecting the optimum time allocation between market and housework of
females in rural Pakistan. In a male dominated society like Pakistan
with strong cultural taboos, a woman's labour force participation can be
expected to depend significantly on non-market factors. In this study we
examine, in particular, whether women's decisions not to work outside
the home are influenced more by social norms, for example purdah and
patriarchy, or by economic constraints such as lack of relevant
education and training, non-availability of job opportunities and low
wages etc.

This paper attempts to determine econometrically the
underlying production relations for the large-scale textile
manufacturing sector of Pakistan, based on data available from the siX
most recent censuses of large-scale manufacturing industries. The
cOllariance model is used for pooling the provincial data. Testing for
alternative forms reveals that the CES production function with
constant-returns-to-scale most adequately explains the underlying
production structure. The estimates of the elasticity of substitution
are significantly different from zero in all cases, implying significant
and efficient employment generation possibilities.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is one of the most important measures used in economic analysis. The more common uses are: the indexation of wages, rents, contracts and social security payments; the deflation of household consumption in the national accounts; and as a general macroeconomic indicator, especially for inflation targeting and for setting interest rates. Elements of a CPI are also often used in the calculation of purchasing power parities (PPPs) required in the Interna-tional Comparison Program (ICP) (UN, 2009). As such it also has very significant political implications when the performance of the governments is assessed in terms of real growth, inflation and poverty reduction. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2; PSSP ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)