PPP govt has one face for domestic audience, another for world community

Monday, November 17, 2008
By Mehtab Haider

ISLAMABAD: While admitting substantial reduction in poverty by over 12 per cent from 2001 due to the improved economic situation, the PPP- led government has endorsed the poverty figure of 22.3 per cent of the Aziz-Musharraf government in its latest official document titled “Draft Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP-II).”

The PPP government has dual faces ——— one for the consumption of domestic audience and the second for the international community, including the multilateral and bilateral donors, in order to convince them for lending money in order to remove economic woes.

The government is preparing the much awaited PRSP-II document on the basis of which it will get multi-billion dollars in the next three- to five- year period. For domestic audience, sources pointed out that Advisor to the Prime Minister on Finance Shaukat Tareen had said recently in the Senate that the people living below the poverty line comprised 40 per cent of the total population. But his ministry’s official document states that the poverty level stood at 22.3 per cent in accordance with the latest available survey of 2005-06.

The advisor had used the survey of the Planning Commission’s panel of economist in which they used the expenditure data of 2005-06 and applied recent inflation number in order to jack up the poverty figures from 23.3 per cent to 35 per cent.

But all independent economists as well as donors were amazed that how the incumbent regime was comparing apple with oranges. “There is no need to change goals for analysing the poverty figure because no one will trust the government,” said one of the officials.

The government has collected data for the Household Income Expenditure Survey 2007-08 and on the basis of this data the poverty survey will be done within the ongoing financial year 2008-09.

The PRSP-II is meant to address the foreign countries as well as the donors’ community in which the government concedes that the poverty was on decline during the PRSP period from 34.6 per cent in 2001-02 to 23.3 per cent in 2005-06.

“Poverty in both urban and rural areas declined from 2001-02 to 2005-06 as urban poverty declined from 22.7 per cent in 2001 to 13.1 per cent in 2005-06 and rural poverty reduced from 39.3 per cent in 2001 to 27 per cent in 2005-06,” states the PRSP-II document.

The PRSP-II further states that the poverty in all its forms and manifestations witnessed decline in the recent years as the extremely poor stood at 1.1 per cent in 2001, which declined to 0.5 per cent in 2005-06. The ultra poor stood at 10.8 per cent in 2001 that declined to 5.4 per cent in 2005-06. The poor stood at 22.5 per cent in 2001, which reduced to 16.4 per cent in 2005-06. Educational attainment and occupation household heads appear to be highly correlated with poverty incidence of the households. According to the Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement (PSLM) survey 2005-06 data, educational attainment of household heads differ starkly between the rich and the poor.

Among the poorest 20 per cent population (or quintile), nearly 70 per cent household heads did not complete class I; however, among the richest quintile, only 20 per cent household heads did not complete class I.

On the other hand, almost no heads in the poorest quintile completed class II or more while more than 30 per cent of heads in the richest quintile completed class II or more. In 2005-06, nearly 40 per cent of household heads in the poorest quintile held the so-called “elementary occupations” while less than 20 per cent in the richest quintile held the elementary occupations.

Its a vicious circle of credit and begging*ofcourse Intrest Included). IMF and other such institutions are a way employed by the Jewish and Zionist powers to keep the people all over the world under their control by keeping them always worried about their finances.

They control via leaders like we have here,they would never want rather need to monitor as we are greedy by nature. So dont ever expect IMF to monitor the spending of the loan by itself they dont need that, they know that obviously our so called leaders would fill up their ever expanding stomachs and walk away to come back again and we would be left again wondering about our necessities.

Muslims are the only threat and they surely know how to keep Muslims at bay.(For the Time Being atleast——surely we know that it is going to end finally——you cant deny)