Pakistan Remains Seriously Off-Track On Millennium Goals
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By Nadeem Malik
Islamabad: Poverty in Pakistan has stagnated at around one-third of the population, and the country remains seriously off track in its race towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), says the Global Monitoring Report 2005 released Monday.
The report, a joint publication of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, finds success stories in South Asia, with ‘two notable exceptions are Afghanistan, which is emerging from decades of conflict, and Pakistan, where poverty has stagnated at around one-third of the population.’ The report maintains that reducing poverty remains a huge challenge for South Asia, but the income poverty MDG is within reach, as continued high economic growth will raise incomes, widen economic opportunities, and create jobs for poor people. However, sustaining rapid growth will require further improvements throughout the region in the investment climate, basic infrastructure, and delivery of basic services within a framework of macroeconomic (especially fiscal) stability.
With per capita income averaging $460 a year, the eight countries of South Asia—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—are home to nearly 40 percent of the world’s people living on less than $1 a day. But since 1990 the region has achieved annual GDP growth of nearly 5.5 percent, helping to reduce poverty significantly. India—the region’s largest country, with a population of more than 1 billion people—has reduced its poverty rate by 7–10 percentage points since 1990, the report says. Most other countries in the region have registered similarly significant reductions.
The report says that improving the delivery of human development and key related services has also been instrumental in boosting the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) related outcomes and prospects. Three places in South Asia stand out as having especially good MDG indicators for their income levels. Sri Lanka and the Indian state of Kerala have strong records of good performance (similar to those in high-income countries; reflecting the priority that successive governments have long given to investing in human development. And Bangladesh has shown remarkable progress on many of the MDGs despite its low income, high poverty (second only to Afghanistan in the region), adverse initial conditions, high population density, contentious politics, and vulnerability to natural disasters.
The report says that a number of MDGs are within the region’s reach if service access and delivery improve for poor people—as shown by the region’s success stories. Yet despite substantial public spending, health, education, water, and sanitation services continue to fail poor people in some countries and states. In many cases this is due to the fragile accountability between users, providers, politicians, and policymakers caused by ineffective public institutions, poor focus on outcomes and incentives, political clientelism and patronage, and difficulty of monitoring and supervision. But with democracy firmly rooted across the region, the devolution of political power to lower levels of governments is proceeding.
“While progress varies, decentralizing resources and responsibilities to local providers and communities holds prospects for better service delivery. Against this backdrop the universal primary education, gender equality, child mortality, and major disease MDGs appear within reach of most South Asian countries, with only Afghanistan, Pakistan, and poorer states in India remaining off track unless progress quickens substantially.
In South Asia, the report says, reaching the education MDG will require faster overall progress: in India, where impressive performance in a number of states has not yet translated into aggregate national progress; in Pakistan, which remains seriously off track; and Afghanistan, which is recovering quickly, but from a tragically low base.
Pakistan received large amounts of net aid in 2001 and 2002 (about $2 billion a year), but loan repayments on previously rescheduled debt lowered net flows in 2003. Although multilateral ODA—comprising grants and net concessional lending—has grown in recent years, total multilateral flows to developing countries have declined. Multilateral ODA grew by 7 percent in nominal terms between 2001 and 2003, with higher grants offsetting a decline in net concessional debt flows. Because of rising incomes in developing countries, higher aid volumes have translated into only a modest rise in the share of ODA in recipients’ GNI. Globally, per capita ODA edged up in recent years, averaging about $14 in 2003, though this was below the level of the early 1990s. Again, there was wide regional variation, with Sub-Saharan Africa receiving the most ODA per capita.
The report says that scaling up of development assistance will be effective only if poor countries have adequate capacity to absorb more aid. Capacity constraints to effective absorption of resources can manifest themselves at a number of levels— from national policy and public budget management to local service delivery—and in various ways—including macroeconomic management, institutional capacity, infrastructure, human capital, social, and cultural factors.
A 2003 Development Committee report assessed the capacity of 18 well-performing low-income countries to effectively use more aid to achieve the MDGs. It found that the five large Asian countries in the sample (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Vietnam) could absorb an immediate doubling or more of aid.
The 2005 Global Monitoring Report is part of a five-year stocktaking effort to monitor progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
More than 180 world leaders agreed unanimously to the development goals at the UN Millennial Summit in New York in September, 2000. The report will be discussed by finance ministers, central bankers, and development ministers in Washington at the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF. It will also serve as an important input into the upcoming G8 heads of state meeting to be held in the UK in July and the UN Summit on the MDGs in September.
ENDS.
