Week 15 – Social

Development and Welfare

Dr. Muhammad Ali Jan
ITU
• Pakistan’s paradoxical record: respectable rates of growth and low
human development
• Different models explaining this  elites and education; women and
fertility; ethnic fissures
• Pakistan has both elite domination and ethnic diversity
• Various indicators of female mortality, low education etc.
• Fewer human rights than other countries at this level of income
• High defense spending (security state vs. social welfare)
• Regional, provincial divisions
• Class gap in educational attainment
• The gap between female and male illiteracy actually increased with rising
per capita income in Pakistan, while it declined sharply in other
comparably growing countries (reasons?)
• Experience of previous government programs
• Bhutto’s nationalization --> poor quality of schools, teacher absenteeism (link to
previous lectures?)
• Explanations offered:
• Feudal control (how convincing?)
• Centralization of decision making
• Male elites reluctant to invest in women’s education
• Political instability  roving bandit thesis (also linked to ethnolinguistic diversity)
• Polarization  fewer public goods but high defense spending
• Rent-seeking, politicization of once competent civil service
• Testing of hypotheses:
• Feudal  actually low gini co-efficient!
• The results are uneven but supportive of the hypothesis that Pakistan’s poor level of
human capital investment for a given level of income is related to its high degree of
ethnic and class polarization.
• Also shows why social pay-offs to foreign aid are low in polarized societies
• Another puzzle to study in future research is why the low human capital indicators did
not prevent a respectable growth rate of 2.2 percent per capita over 1950-99. It may be
that a certain degree of development and growth was attainable with a skilled
managerial elite and unskilled workers, but over time this strategy ran into diminishing
returns as human capital did not grow at the same rate as the other factors. This is
consistent with the slowdown in growth from the mid-80s to the present, but this
requires more study to confirm. This interpretation is supported by some of the
evidence of the cross-country growth regression literature
• Pakistan interesting case that growth alone not enough for social development for sure!
 Social Protection in Pakistan: A paradigm
shift post 2008?
• 2008 context: new democratically elected dispensation in the middle
of a global economic crisis
• All provinces showing remarkable cooperation in instituting the
flagship social protection program: Benazir Income Support (BISP)
• Highest allocation towards social protection in Pakistan’ history
• Legal Protection
• Remarkable degree of coverage/reach so less gap between allocation and
implementation
• How did this happen? Does it represent a paradigm shift in terms of
government commitment to social protection?
 Antecedents to 2008
• National Social Protection Strategy (NSPS) 2007 first comprehensive
official statement with respect to social protection
• 3 broad goals underpinning:
• Risk mitigation
• Redistribution to reduce inequity
• Mass mobilization of poor
• NSPS 2007 was largely confined to the first motivation of risk mitigation
• But still recommended increase – albeit gradual – of allocations
towards social protection (cash transfers, school feeding, care work
etc.) to 36 billion over 5 years.
 2008 elections and the dramatic shift
• Post-lawyer’s movement and elections a new government was instituted with
PPP in federal and PML-N in the province of Punjab
• While in alliance initially, they also were in competition and this may partly
explain why the PPP initiated the BISP and to rival it PML-N started the ‘Sasti roti
scheme’
• From the gradual increase to 35 billion rupees over 5 years a sudden jump in one year to
50 billion rupees
• This was in addition to existing social protection programs
• Moreover, BISP went further in identifying women as primary recipients
• An equally important reason was the global financial crisis itself which had
coincided and combined with a food crisis in Pakistan in 2008  social
protection became an important rallying cry for the government
• So both the political platforms of the political parties in terms of rhetoric as well
as the context of 2008 economic crisis combined to make it politically feasible to
increase allocations towards social protection
 The political economy of BISP
• Initially setup as a provisional measure under the annual development
plan
• The will to provide protection was there but there were gaps in implementation
like always initially
• NADRA was tapped to help but combined with other sources like
parliamentarians themselves to identify potential beneficiaries
• Other supporting systems like poverty baseline surveys etc.
• A new apparatus of social protection slowly being created out of mixing
and matching of existing institutional setups
• But soon brought under its own law and given legal protection and
funding from the cabinet division
• Factors helping to solidify it were also the political gains that were felt
by the parties