Nutrition Planning: Analysis of Some Policy Options

Pakistan’s Development Perspective (1975-80) provides for an increase in private consumption at the rate of over 7 percent per annum and this implies a per capita increase of 4.2 percent per year. In order to examine the implication of these projections it is of interest to look at almost all aspects of the country’s economic and socio-political structure. This paper focuses primarily on just one part of the overall picture-namely some options that might be considered on the demand side of the economy. Ideally one would like to understand each individual’s milieu and characteristics to try and project his future behaviour as a consumer with reasonable accuracy. In practice this is, of course, not feasible so that one must strive for a balance between a manageable amount of data and yet capture enough of the key features of market behaviour to produce meaningful results. These features should ideally reflect socio-economic status, and regional and seasonal variations. Largely because of the type of data readily available, this paper tends to emphasize the first class of features and for the most part ignores the other two.