2. Escenarios y tiempos
2.1. Los extranjeros en una ciudad cosmopolita
Demographic changes
This section reviews trends in selected demographic variables, poverty, and land owner- ship at the national level. For demographic trends, the last five decades can be divided into two broad periods: 1960 to the late 1980s and 1990 to 2010. In the former period, mortality declined steadily but fertility remained high, leading to a gradual increase in population growth. The latter period is characterized by the onset of fertility transition, which led to a modest decline in population growth.
The economic development that took place in the period 1960–89 appears to have strongly influenced the population growth rate through declines in death rates. The crude death rate declined from 23 to 10 per 1,000, and the infant mortality rate (IMR) declined from 150 to 100 per 1,000 live births between 1960 and the late 1980s. TFR remained high, around 6, until the 1980s. Thus, economic development in the 1960s through the 1980s contributed positively to population growth. Growth in per capita income remained modest; in fact in several years, it was negative.
Since the late 1980s fertility has declined gradually to 4 children per woman at pres- ent, resulting in a decline in the share of the very young and an increase in the share of the working-age population. GDP growth fluctuated during the post-1980 period: low in the 1990s, high during 2003–07, and low again in the last 4–5 years.
Poverty
Table 5.1 summarizes the poverty estimates provided by studies that used the calorific approach but used different threshold levels. Despite high economic growth, the 1960s witnessed high levels of poverty of around 40 percent, increasing mainly in the rural areas. One explanation for this unexpected relationship between high economic growth rates and the rise in poverty is that the initial beneficiaries of agricultural subsidies in the 1960s were generally large farmers. The benefits of high agricultural growth were thus not translated into reduced levels of poverty. Poverty declined rapidly during the 1970s when the rate of GDP growth slowed to less than 5 percent. It appears that the growth– poverty relationship in the 1960s and 1970s was not in the expected direction.
Poverty declined steeply during the period of high GDP growth in the 1980s whereas it increased sharply in the 1990s when GDP growth slowed. Private investment in agri- culture during the 1970s, improved performance of the agriculture sector in the 1980s, and inflows of foreign remittances associated with migration to the Middle East were the major reasons for declines in poverty during the 1970s and 1980s. The rise in poverty started in the early 1990s and continued until the beginning of the new millennium, when the headcount ratio was about 35 percent. In addition to the decline in economic growth, several other factors are responsible for the rise in poverty in the 1990s. The in- flows of foreign remittances, which are believed to be one of the major factors for reduc- ing poverty during the 1980s, also declined markedly during the 1990s. Poverty declined sharply again during the first half of the last decade, from 35 percent in 2000–01 to 22 percent in 2005–06—a decline of more than 12 percentage points in only five years.
CAPTURING THE DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND IN PAKISTAN
The fraction of the population living below the poverty line in rural areas has de- clined from 39 percent in 2000–01 to 27 percent in 2005–06, while the corresponding decline in urban areas was from 23 percent to 13 percent. The sharp decline in rural areas, however, failed to narrow the rural–urban gap: rural poverty was more than double urban poverty in 2005–06. One of the main reasons for poverty reduction dur- ing 2000 to 2006 was the high economic growth recorded by most sectors. Other factors likely to have contributed to poverty reduction include increased public spending, especially on education, health, and infrastructure (rural electrification, roads, and ir- rigation improvements).
After 2006, no official statistics on poverty are available. Presently, the economy of Pakistan is facing severe challenges with a declining rate of economic growth, double- digit inflation (particularly affecting food prices), power shortages, and rising oil prices. The ongoing war on terrorism has also diverted public expenditure from development to security. On the other hand, the inflow of foreign remittances through formal sources has increased to more than US$10 billion per annum.
Regarding rural–urban poverty, three dimensions are noteworthy from Table 5.1. First, during the last five decades changes in poverty in rural and urban areas were mainly in the same direction: an increase or decrease in poverty was observed in both areas. Second, until the 1970s, the difference in poverty levels between rural and urban areas was modest, 5 to 8 percentage points. After the 1980s, this difference widened, and in 2005–06 rural poverty was double the rate of urban poverty. Third, poverty in Paki-
taBLe 5.1 trends in poverty (head count ratios) in urban and rural Pakistan
Period urban Rural Overall
1963–64 44.5 38.9 40.2 1966–67 41.0 45.6 44.5 1969–70 38.8 49.1 46.5 1979 25.9 32.5 30.7 1984–85 21.2 25.6 24.5 1987–88 15.0 18.3 17.3 1990–91 18.6 23.6 22.1 1992–93 24.6 28.3 26.8 1996–97 22.6 33.1 29.8 1998–99 20.9 34.7 30.6 2000–01 22.7 39.3 34.5 2004–05 14.9 28.1 23.9 2005–06 13.1 27.0 22.3
NOTE: Poverty estimates in this table are not based on a consistent poverty line. SOURCE: Amjad and kemal 1997; Cheema 2005; goP 2009a.
stan is often considered a rural phenomenon not only because of the higher incidence in rural areas but also because of the high absolute number of the rural poor—two-third of the total population lives in rural areas.
Landholding
Only 37 percent of rural households owned some land in 1980 (Table 5.2). In 1972, 47 percent of the country’s households owned less than five acres of land, and these house- holds owned 5 percent of the total land. By contrast, only 3 percent of households had landholding of more than 50 acres, and owned 22 percent of the total land. The situation has hardly changed in three decades. In 2000 only 37 percent of rural households owned land and 61 percent of these owned fewer than five acres (15 percent of total land). Two percent of rural households owned 50 acres or more, accounting for 30 percent of the total land (World Bank 2007). Land in rural Pakistan is distributed far more unevenly than income (Hirashima 2009).