Suchergebnisse

In 2001, a scheme called Citizen Community Board (CCB), a kind of community-based organisation (CBO), was introduced in Pakistan as a devolution policy, under which local people propose to the local government development projects through forming a CCB and upon approval the local government funds 80 percent of the project cost. Since 2001, however, both the number of CCBs and that of approved projects have been below the expected level. This raises a concern that the Pakistani society with limited historical experience in CBO-based development is too handicapped for the CCB scheme to be successful. Although the number of empirical studies on Pakistan's CCB scheme has been increasing [e.g., see Cheema and Mohmand (2004), Cheema, et al. (2006)], our understanding on conditions for a success of such schemes is limited. This paper thus attempts to analyse the conditions in the context of community and economic development in Pakistan from Japanese Perspectives.

In 2001, a scheme called Citizen Community Board (CCB), a kind of communitybased organisation (CBO), was introduced in Pakistan, under which local people propose development projects to the local government through forming a CCB, and upon approval the local government funds 80 percent of the project cost. Since 2001, however, both the number of CCBs and that of approved projects have been below the expected level. This raises a concern that the Pakistani society with limited historical experience in CBO-based development is too handicapped for the CCB scheme to be successful. This paper addresses this concern through quantifying the determinants of successful formation of a CCB and those of successful development activities conditional on the formation. The regression results using a cross-section dataset in a district in Pakistan Punjab in 2004-05 suggest that the rules within a CCB and the type of leadership are key to the success of CCB initiatives.

In this paper, the concept of vulnerability of the poor's welfare and its practical measures are scrutinised in order to derive implications for targeting poverty reduction policies toward vulnerable households. As illustration, various measures of vulnerability proposed in the literature are applied to a panel data-set collected from rural Pakistan. The empirical results show that different vulnerability rankings can be obtained depending on the choice of the measure. By utilising these measures, we can identify who and which region is more vulnerable to a particular type of risk. This kind of information is useful in targeting poverty reduction policies. Since the nature of vulnerability is diverse, it is advisable to use the whole vector of various vulnerability measures. JEL classification: I32, I38. Keywords: Vulnerability, Poverty, Risk, Consumption Smoothing, Pakistan.

This paper empirically examines the spatial and intertemporal price relations of grains in Pakistan's Punjab. The salient feature of the paper is that quantity variables such as market surplus and government release are incorporated in the price arbitrage model to quantify the effects of government interventions. Regression analysis using three-year crosssection data shows that the farm-gate prices of wheat after harvest are mostly explained by the government support price while those of Basmati paddy have more unexplained variation. This difference could be due to a difference in the price support mechanism. Investigation on intertemporal price relations shows that wholesale wheat prices regularly increase at the rate of storage costs in the first half of a food year, and that the price rise is repressed by the government release in the second half only in a normal year.

The approach of community-based development (CBD) is expected to improve targeting and reduce programme costs of poverty reduction policies, besides other positive contributions [Mansuri and Rao (2004)]. 1 Furthermore, the use of local knowledge is expected to bear greater relevance in a situation where credible monetary data for potential use in targeting activities are not available. According to Alatas, et al. (2012), in developing countries—where the majority of potential target group is employed in the informal sector—the availability of verifiable income records is always an issue. Therefore, it is difficult to identify target groups by employing conventional targeting techniques such as means tests. For these reasons, identification through the CBD approach is expected to improve targeting.

AbstractAggregate shocks such as droughts and floods cannot be perfectly insured by risk sharing within a village. Given this inability, what type of households are more vulnerable in terms of a decline in consumption when a village is hit by such shocks and what kind of microeconomic mechanism underlies the household heterogeneity in vulnerability? These questions are investigated using two-period panel data collected in rural Pakistan in 2001 and 2004. We compare consumption response to droughts, floods and health shocks and investigate how the response differs across different types of households. Empirical results show that the impact of droughts was negligible, younger and more landed households were less vulnerable to floods, and households with greater access to formal financial institutions were less vulnerable to idiosyncratic health shocks. The empirical pattern suggests the possibility of risk sharing among households that are heterogeneous in both risk aversion and credit access.

As one of the dimensions of vulnerability, this paper empirically investigates the inability of rural dwellers to cope with negative income shocks. A variable coefficient regression model is applied to a two-period household panel dataset collected in the North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, an area with high incidence of income poverty and low human development. The empirical model allows for a different ability to smooth consumption, approximated by a linear function of households' attributes, and controls for the endogeneity of observed changes in income, using qualitative information on subjective risk assessment. Estimation results show that the ability to cope with negative income shocks is lower for households that are aged, landless and do not receive remittances regularly. (DSE/GIGA)

This paper proposes an empirical model of profit variability at the individual farm level and applies it to Pakistan's agriculture. Results show that the addition of idiosyncratic yield shocks and adjustment for input costs lead to a much larger variability of net profits than implied by the variability of average gross revenues–Pakistan's irrigated agriculture is associated with higher profit variability compared with semiarid India. It is also demonstrated that the correlation between green fodder profit and milk profit at the farm level is substantially negative. This negative correlation implies that it is advantageous, in terms of risk diversification, to combine fodder and milk production in one enterprise, which is commonly observed in the mixed farming systems in Pakistan's Punjab.