About
PAKISTAN DIALOGUES
Eeman Qureshi and Rimsha Arif
The challenge of circular debt has persistently plagued Pakistan's power sector and has worsened over time across subsequent governments...
Ayesha Malik
The head of the UN mission to Sudan, Volker Perthes, announced to the Security Council on March 27, 2023 that he...
Manahil Naeem
For my senior year project on an Economics and Anthropology course, I did fieldwork in a low-income community in Lahore called Chungi Amar...
Rabea Malik and Faisal Bari
For most countries, certainly Pakistan, the state remains the largest and most significant provider of services. Implementation of service
Rabia Khan and Verda Arif
Every year, numerous discussions, podcasts, university events, etc. take place regarding the puzzle that is the Pakistani economy. A country...
Abid Aman Burki
Pakistan’s Punjab province has access to rich district-representative household survey data from the Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICS). Five...
Nausheen Anwar and Eisha Shakeel
In urban Pakistan, limited access to, and the safety of, public transport is estimated to reduce female labor force participation. Minibusses are...
Hana Zahir
There is evidence to suggest that the digitization of land records benefits marginalized land-owning groups, such as...
Saira A. Qureshi, Abdus Sami Khan, Rafiullah Kakar, Barkat Shah Kakar, and Muhammad Saleem
Balochistan covers about 44% of Pakistan’s territory and houses about 6% of its population. Huge distances and low population density provide a unique...
Rabia Khan and Verda Arif
Post the 1960s, Pakistan’s economic history has not been especially renowned for innovation or excellence. But in 2022...
Gonzalo J. Varela
The average Pakistani worker produces 40 percent more value added today than 30 years ago. The average Polish worker 187 percent more, and the average Vietnamese one ...
Verda Arif
In light of recent adversity, this blog piece aims to address two main concerns. Firstly, how has this natural calamity affected women and children, two of the most vulnerable groups of Pakistani society? Secondly, to what extent...
Hamna Ahmed, Mehreen Mahmud, Zunia Saif, and Farah Said
Why aren’t much higher levels of women entering the labour market given the levels of aspiration in the population? Addressing this puzzle is important because...
Rabia Khan and Verda Arif
Considering recent events within the Pakistani and Sri Lankan economies, this blog piece assesses the following question: should Pakistan consider the Sri Lankan default a warning sign for its own economy?
Abid A. Burki, Verda Arif, and Abubakar Memon
Pakistan’s yields of major crops are sensitive to irregular and shifting precipitation patterns and rising temperatures due to climate change. However, these studies have not...
Abid A. Burki, Shabbir Ahmad and Raza Mustafa Khan
Growth in total factor productivity (TFP) is usually measured as growth in aggregate output minus growth in aggregate input. Previous studies have...
Maham Rasheed, Taram Nayab and Syed Hasan
The rapid pace of urbanization in the South Asian region and Pakistan has led to the growth of urban settlements that are broadly categorized as “messy” and ...
Asad Ejaz Butt
While the evidence is torn between the positive and negative impacts of climate mitigation and adaptation measures on economic growth, the latter case has attracted more ...
Sher Afghan Asad and Omar Hayat Gondal
Chances are that the fruits and vegetables you ate today have been routed through one of the government-regulated wholesale markets after following a complex supply chain. This may lead us to think...
Niloufer Siddiqui
The ouster of former prime minister Imran Khan through a no-confidence vote in April 2022 divided an already polarized nation. Since then...
Sohela Nazneen
Feminist activism has faced new and diverse challenges over the past decade. These have led to an increased dismantling of civil liberties, freedom of speech, expression, and...
Dan Honig
Management reform strategies are often steeped in a top-down, command-and-control, incentive-laden theory of change. In my work, I explore when these approaches are useful, and...
Timothy Besley, Robin Burgess, Adnan Khan, Jonathan Old, and Guo Xu
How does bureaucracy matter for state capacity and development? Over the last years, enormous interest in this question has created a large body of research, mostly focused around...
Mohammad Waseem
What precipitated the political crisis in Pakistan that brought about a change in the government? Will the nation move beyond the crisis any time soon? How can the implicit clash of institutions be avoided?
Saher Asad
The regulation of electronic media happens through PEMRA, which is authorized in its watchdog capacity to send notices and directives to channels. But where does PEMRA dedicate most of its time?
Rafat Mahmood and Michael Jetter
Despite the huge amounts of funds dedicated to the program and the repeated applause of the precision and efficacy of drone strikes from policy circles, evidence on the effectiveness of drone strikes as a counter-terrorism strategy is...
Sabrin Beg
What happens when property rights are not secure? In a recent paper, I delve into the role of property rights in explaining the misallocation of land and labor...
Sabrin Beg
Despite primary education being established as one of the 8-millennium development goals at the turn of the century, challenges still persist on the question of access...
Hadia Majid and Syeda Warda Riaz
BISP has a stated objective of reducing gender inequalities and empowering women while combatting poverty.Yet, the expectation that transfer (and otherwise) income improves women’s options outside of marriage and changes household dynamics in their favor does not always hold. This is especially true when...
Soledad Prillaman
While positive swings most certainly indicate improving trends in women’s political inclusion, should we see the lack of a gender gap in turnout as indicative of women’s political agency? My recent research in rural India suggests maybe not...
Erum A. Haider
Providing fair and equitable access to utilities is the cornerstone of building trust between states and citizens. But states are increasingly under pressure to reduce subsidies for utilities such as water and electricity. Last year...
Affaf Ahmed, Mudabbir Ali, Danyal Khan, Miguel Loureiro, and Rizwan Wazir
What does governance look like from the perspectives of chronically poor and marginalised households?...
Shad Moarif
There is little research in the Pakistani context on the impact of teacher background on student learning outcomes in government schools. The diversity of teachers across the country...
Fizzah Sajjad
On 11 November 2021, Zakia Bibi, a resident of the Gujjar Nala community in Karachi, passed away from a heart attack after her home was demolished by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) on the Supreme Court’s directives. Just a week before...
Arif Hasan
Karachi floods at the slightest of rains. Karachiites have historically tolerated this because flooding usually lasts for a few days with bearable aftereffects. However, in 2020, the rains were exceptionally heavy...
Maira Hayat
In 2015, local elections were held in Pakistan, ten years after the previous ones in 2005 during General Pervez Musharraf’s military rule. Local government elections...
Rehan R Jamil, Matteo Iudice
Over the past two decades, Pakistan has experienced a ‘paradigm’ shift in its approach to social protection ( Gazdar, 2011 ). Prior to the creation of the Benazir Income Support...
Amina Omer, Umair Javed
What does the politics of energy tell us about the relationship of the Pakistani state with its citizens? With loadshedding in the news again, it is worth looking at the preceding two decades to assess whether any substantive change in this relationship has taken place...
Felix Agyemang, Sean Fox, Rashid Memon
Rapid urbanization in low and middle-income countries is contributing to the ‘urbanization of poverty’. Yet the true scale and nature of this challenge are unknown. Census data are infrequent and household surveys...
Between 2010 and 2018, there appeared to be some very exciting and frenetic reform efforts unfolding across the school education sector in the Punjab. Moving the needle on school access and learning outcomes, it seemed, was as aspiration closest to the hearts...
Huma Zia Faran
In Pakistan, 26% of children in the 5-16 age cohort have never been to a school. This translates into 16 million children (out of a total of 20 million children who are out of school) as reported in The Missing Third...
Shad Moarif
Today, we see bright, knowledgeable folks of all ages, male and female, who know and understand education far better than those with decision-making powers. Almost all come from a segment of society that has benefitted from...
Nasir Iqbal
The prevalence of child labour in Pakistan is very high: up to 22% of children between the ages of 5 and 14 years are engaged in the worst form of child labour, including bonded labour in agriculture and brick kilns...
Ali Cheema, Sarah Khan, Shandana Khan Mohmand
Ali Cheema, Sarah Khan, Shandana Khan Mohmand
Covid-19 lockdown measures resulted in an increase in care and housework in homes around the world. But with the greater presence of men at home as a result of lockdown and job losses, why are women...
Ali Cheema, Sarah Khan, Shandana Khan Mohmand
With Pakistan facing a fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and new restrictions being imposed in major cities, research from the IDS-led Action for Empowerment and Accountability programme sheds new light on the gendered impacts and experiences of the pandemic in urban Pakistan...
Soufia A. Siddiqi, Momina Idrees, Musharfa Shah
As educational institutions across Pakistan slowly reopen for a new academic year, an underlying anxiety is taking root: by how much has the learning of Pakistani students been set back? If lessons from recent scholarship are anything to go by, our youngest children...
Dr. Hadia Majid, Syeda Warda Riaz
There remains an overwhelming need to reduce the gender gap in labor force participation rates in Pakistan. As of 2021, women’s participation rates remain at around 22 pc with the country recording the slowest progress in closing the gender gap in the Economic Participation...
Ayesha Khan
In a study conducted as part of the Action for Empowerment and Accountability multi-country research programme, we found that Covid-19 has accelerated the shrinking of civic space in Pakistan. A narrowing civic space...
Zahra Mughis, Syed M. Hasan
This blog is based on the paper “Who can work and study from home in Pakistan: Evidence from a 2018–19 nationwide household survey” by Syed M. Hasan (LUMS), Attique ur Rehman (LUMS) and Wendong Zhang (Iowa State University) and published in World Development
Aliya Khalid, Musharfa Shah
Any continuous area or expanse which is available for consumption is typically referred to as ‘space’. In the Urdu language, this can translate to ‘khalaa’ understood as the ‘absence’ of forms, but at the same time generative of other or newer forms, much like silence in a musical composition...
Ayesha Ali, Javed Younas
Electricity is the wheel that drives all facets of our daily lives such as production, consumption, communication, transportation and routine financial transactions. Despite its key role in powering the national economy, Pakistan’s electricity sector continues its struggle with significant challenges. Whether these manifest as costly...
Abid A. Burki, Arsalan Hussain, Kinza Emad Khan
Inequality has emerged as a major global challenge around the world, and reducing inequalities within and amongst countries has been recognized as a UN SDG goal (no. 10). Growing levels of inequality tend to create poverty because money continues to move from those who must spend...
Eraj Tufail Arbab
Past crises in Pakistan have never been gender-neutral and women have suffered disproportionately for a long time (Tariq and Bibler, 2020). Indeed, evidence from previous disasters and pandemics suggests that women are more vulnerable...
Areeba Suhail, Leena Salman
In April 2020, following a national lockdown due to Covid-19, numerous jobs across Pakistan became home-based. Although this represented a significant disruption to all sectors and genders, women seemed to become especially ...
Sameen A. Mohsin Ali and Samia W. Altaf
Vaccine hesitancy is a global phenomenon and one of particular concern at the present moment with the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines and their reception around the world. An extensive literature studies...
Zeba Sathar
In 1992, Larry Summers in his lecture at the Annual Pakistan Society of Development Economics titled, “Investing in all the people”, presented a compelling argument in favor of girls’ education for development. The main academic debates...
Ali Cheema, Sarah Khan, Shandana Khan Mohmand
The lived experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic are starkly divided along gender lines, and the pandemic has already exacerbated gender inequalities within the home and in the labour market across countries...
Maha Rehman
(Excerpts from this article first appeared in the weekly newsletter for Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University)
Ali Cheema, Sarah Khan, Shandana Khan Mohmand
The lived experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic are starkly divided along gender lines, and the pandemic has already exacerbated gender inequalities within the home and in the labour market across countries...
Ali Cheema, Sarah Khan, Shandana Khan Mohmand
To understand the gendered impacts and experiences of the pandemic in urban Pakistan and inform gender-sensitive policy responses, researchers from the Institute of Development Studies and IDEAS (working under the auspices of the Action for Empowerment...
Umair Javed
About 60 percent of the world’s labour force works in the informal sector, typically outside the net of formal institutionalised relationships between workers, states and companies. This means that informal workers are often excluded from state-led social protection programmes and the various formal...
Hadia Majid
The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented in several aspects. Even aside from its significant health impact, with 2.2 million deaths so far, the economic fallout has created the worst recession since the great depression...
Ali Cheema, Maha Rehman
COVID-19 is a health pandemic with economic consequences whose severity cannot be underestimated. Yet there is limited understanding of the pandemic’s effects on the economic lives of citizens. We address this gap using the Pakistan...
Kashif Z Malik, Farah Said
COVID-19 is a health pandemic with economic consequences whose severity cannot be underestimated. Yet there is limited understanding of the pandemic’s effects on the economic lives of citizens. In Pakistan, we are able to address this ...
Saher Asad, Javaeria Qureshi, Taimur Shah, and Basit Zafar
While the average people walking the streets of Pakistan may have taken off their mask and the news media may have moved on from discussing the economic impacts of COVID-19, data shows that the economic distress caused by the pandemic is far from over.
Sanval Nasim, Mahnoor Kashif
The authority to regulate pollution in Punjab rests with the provincial Environmental Protection Department (EPD). The EPD has a broad mandate to protect the environment, which includes informing the public on environmental issues and enforcing the Punjab Environmental Quality Standards (PEQS).
