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Poverty puzzle
November 14, 2025

Rashid Amjad

The recent World Bank Pakistan Development Update, released at the end of October 2025, claims that poverty fell in 2024-25. This assertion raises troubling questions, especially since Pakistan’s poverty assessment report, published just a few months earlier by the World Bank, presented a very grim picture. It stated, “Pakistan’s once promising poverty reduction trajectory has come to a troubling halt, reversing years of hard-fought gains.” The report indicated a return to rising poverty, as their estimates after 2022/23 showed.

More importantly, the earlier World Bank poverty assessment stressed that the economic model responsible for reducing poverty from 64.3 per cent in 2001 to 21.9pc in 2018 “had reached its limits”. It noted that further declines in poverty would require much greater effort in the “face of deep-rooted inequalities, political instability, elite capture and vulnerability to climate risk”. The basic message of the assessment was that the resilience of the population, which had previously led to declining poverty, had been significantly weakened by natural disasters, climate change, and the economy’s diminishing capacity to create jobs with adequate income to lift workers out of poverty.

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posted by S A J Shirazi @ 11/14/2025 08:04:00 AM,

World Bank Pakistan Country Partnership Framework 2022-2026 Student Consultation
February 27, 2021


The World Bank is preparing a new Country Partner Framework (CPF) for the next five years from fiscal year 2022-2026. For this, the World Bank organized a consultation webinar on Friday, 19th February, 2021 with students from very exclusive universities across Pakistan to make sure that students' voices are represented and considered in their future precedence. On the Panel were Ms. Melinda Good, Operation Manager, World Bank Pakistan, Ms. Amena Raja, Senior Operations Officer from The World Bank, and AVM (R.) Faaiz Amir, Member (Governance & amp; Academics), from Higher Education Commission (HEC). Lahore School of Economics (LSE) was one of the only 3 universities selected from Punjab to be a part of the Webinar. Muaz R. Chaudhry, Research Associate at the Innovation & Technology Centre, and Aysham Sohail were the two nominees from senior year (BSc. IV) to represent the Lahore School.

The webinar focused on five themes: Girls & Boys Education, Governance, Growing Healthy, Green Pakistan and Growth. Under these themes, the main priority or focus areas were i) primary and secondary access, quality education ii) Stunting, under 5 mortality, COVID-19 iii) Renewable energy, water and agriculture productivity, pollution/solid waste and iv) Revenue mobilization, social and economic inclusion, competitiveness. The consultation meeting was of immense significance to the national policy of the World Bank towards Pakistan and the Lahore School’s representatives raised extremely important points in the meeting.

Ms. Sohail raised the point of high spells of unemployment in Pakistan due to job-skill mismatch in various sectors of the economy that needs to be looked into; moreover she discussed the new curriculum change in that is being brought about in Pakistan and its high probability of worsening the quality of education with an increased intensity of extremism ingrained within the education system. Mr. Chaudhry, on the other hand, appreciated the World Bank’s effort to improve the country’s education system, but suggested aiming for education more than just for ‘Girls and Boys’ and insisted on renaming the goal to ‘Education for All’, being inclusive for the state and UN recognised gender minorities. He also brought up the point of the national education system being influenced immensely by external forces, therefore, deteriorating the quality of education in the country due to increased extremism and lack of freedom. He then brought into concern the issue of immense PM-2.5 emissions within the country that are majorly a result of crop burning in Pakistan causing the worrisome issue of smog, especially in Lahore for the last few years. The points raised by the Lahore School’s representatives were highly appreciated by the World Bank team who then promised to focus on the highlighted issues and to integrate the points into their national partnership program framework of 2022-2026.

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posted by S A J Shirazi @ 2/27/2021 03:16:00 PM,

Pakistan Development Update Spring 2017
May 17, 2017

The Lahore School of Economics in association with the World Bank is launching the World Bank Pakistan Development Update Spring 2017 on Saturday May 20, 2017 from 10.30am to 1.15pm at a local hotel.

Mian Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister Punjab will preside over the launching ceremony.

Mr Enrique Blanco Armas, Lead Country Economist, World Bank, will present Pakistan Development Update Spring 2017.

Pakistan Development Update [pdf]

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posted by S A J Shirazi @ 5/17/2017 02:05:00 PM,

Lahore School and World Bank Brainstorming Session on Poverty Measurement
April 24, 2015

The Lahore School of Economics and the World Bank jointly organized a brainstorming session on poverty measurement and policy at the Main Campus on 17 April 2015. The session was intended to get an open discussion going on issues in the measurement of poverty, and its implications for policy, and to facilitate the formation of an independent expert group to guide the process of arriving at a credible methodology and process for measuring and monitoring poverty.


Opening comments were made by Dr. Shahid Amjad Chaudhry, Rector, Lahore School of Economics; Mr. Asif Bajwa, Chief Statistician, Pakistan Bureau of Statistics; and Dr. Naeemuz Zafar, Ministry of Planning Development and Reform. Following that, Dr. Ghazala Mansuri, Lead Research Economist at The World Bank gave a presentation on “Poverty debate in Pakistan: What accounts for the disconnect between the data and perceptions?” This raised issues for discussion on lack of confidence in the quality of official surveys such as the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM) and the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES), lack of confidence in the official consumer price index as a measure of inflation faced by the poor, especially in rural areas, concerns about the basket of goods and the calorie threshold used for estimating the poverty line, and the method used for tracking trends.
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posted by S A J Shirazi @ 4/24/2015 09:18:00 AM,

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