Determinants of Household Poverty: Empirical Evidence from Pakistan

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aim at halving the percentage of world population in 1990 with income less than US $ 1 a day and halving the share of people who suffer from hunger by 2015. Being a developing nation, poverty reduction should be our foremost obligation. An appreciable decline has occurred recently, headcount decreased from 34.46 percent in 2000-01 to 23.94 in 2004-05 [Pakistan (2006-07)]. However, seeing only the statistics and the trends in poverty we can just observe that what happened to poverty in different periods and also the decomposition of poverty in different years gives us a more appropriate picture of the incidence of poverty. This knowledge is useful because it informs us whether poverty is increasing or decreasing overtime. However, this information does not provide us the details of the causes of poverty. For instance, is poverty high due to low education attainment or large family size or due to any other reason? Here is a need of research about the determinants of poverty that are positively or negatively linked with the poverty status. This is the area where research can be most useful because firstly we have to understand the main determinants of poverty before designing the most efficient policy to reduce poverty in the country.