Relative Poverty in Pakistan An Estimation from the HouseholdIncome and Expenditure Survey (1984-85)

This paperl operationalises the concept of relative poverty inthe context of Pakistan. The exercise is carried out both at thenational and the provincial level. Basides an estimation of theincidence of poverty at the aggregate level, the paper provides across-sectional comparison of poverty in different socio-economic groupsin the four provinces of Pakistan. The paper is organised in sixsections. After the introduction, Section II gives a brief theoreticalreflection on the concept and measurment of relative poverty. Thissection also describes the methodology followed in this paper. SectionIII presents poverty estimates for the country as a whole and Section IVgives the results for the four provinces of Pakistan. This section alsoexamines the relationship between the findings at the national level andthe provincial level. Section V presents a brief comparison of highpoverty groups across provinces. Some concluding remarks are given atthe end in Section VI.