Edible Oil Deficit and Its Impact on Food Expenditure in Pakistan

This study is an attempt to analyze the impact of Edible Oil Deficit on Food Expenditure in Pakistan for the period 1971-2008. Edible oil deficit is one of the major concerns for the policy makers in Pakistan. Despite of having agriculture based economy; Pakistan is unable to fulfil her domestic demand of edible oil by local production. This situation forces the government to import edible oil and oil seeds from other countries. This import not only increases our balance of payment deficit but also it negatively affects the ability to finance the external debt repayments. Autoregressive Distributed Lag model has been used to analyse the long run relationship amongst the variables. Other important determinants of food expenditure along with edible oil deficit were also used to check for their collective long run impact. It was found that long run negative relationship exists between edible oil deficit and food expenditure and hence the result derives the policy implication that there is a need to boost up the efforts in the agriculture sector to steadily increase the local production of oil seeds in the country. The relationship between the per capita GDP and food expenditure is found to be positive and significant with elasticity of 0.261 suggesting that 1 percent increase in per capita GDP will cause food expenditure to increase by 0.26 percent. The relationship between food subsidy and food expenditure is found to be insignificant suggesting that due to improper targeting and consumer’s perception about quality and accessibility of subsidized food, Government’s food support programs are not effective.Edible Oil; Production; Imports; Trade Deficit; Balance of Payments; International Trade; Oilseed Crops; Agriculture; Pakistan; Edible oil deficit; demand function; food; inflation; food inflation; household expenditure.

Causal Relationship Between Exports and Agricultural GDP in Pakistan

This paper is an attempt to investigate the causal relationships among agriculture and exports in Pakistan by using time series data for the period between 1971 and 2007. There are several efforts reflecting greater interest in exploring the possible relation between the international trade and economic growth. Increasing of Gross Domestic Product is the main target of almost every economy. Promoting exports of the country is one of the ways of achieving economic growth. Pakistan is among the developing countries, emphasizing to boost its exports since its inception. The major share of Pakistan’s export has strong backward linkages with the agricultural sector both in terms of primary and value added commodities. The findings have significant implications on Pakistan’s economic policy as both the variables have shown strong long-run relationship. There is also a bi-directional Granger-causality between the total exports and agricultural GDP. However, for short-run, both the variable does not cause each other in either direction.Causality, Growth, Gross Domestic Product, Agriculture, Exports, Pakistan

Developing pedagogical content knowledge of science teachers through action research: A case study from Pakistan

The aim of this study is to analyze the action research undertaken by Khan as a teacher researcher in a private school as part of the degree requirement of his M.Ed. program in Teacher Education at the Aga Khan University, Institute for Educational Development. The purpose of this analysis undertaken by the first author and supervisor of the study in collaboration with Khan was to understand the development of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of the teacher researcher through action research in a science classroom in the context of Pakistan. Khan taught the concepts of heat and temperature using an inquiry based pedagogy to grade 9 physics class and also examined his own practice of this innovation using action research. Using Carlsen’s concept of PCK as the lens for analysis of the research report written by Khan the first author finds that transforming his understanding of the topic to teach with the indicated instructional strategy required him to transform his own understanding of science content. The findings also indicate that the requirement of cumulative testing wa

Edible Oil Deficit and Its Impact on Food Expenditure in Pakistan

Pakistan, a developing country, is the sixth most populous in the world [U. S. Census (2008)], whose demand is rising due to steady economic growth. Agriculture contributes 23 percent of the GDP, 42 percent of the total work force is employed to the agriculture sector and also contributes substantially to Pakistan’s export earnings [Alam (2008)]. Agriculture Commodities and Textiles Products accounts for 62.6 percent of Pakistan's total exports [Memon (2008)]. Pakistan is the ninth largest producer of wheat, 12th largest producer of rice, 5th largest producer of sugarcane and 4rth largest producer of cotton among the top producers in the world as per statistics of FY05 [Memon, et al. (2008)]. Despite overwhelmingly an agrarian economy, Pakistan is unable to produce edible oil sufficient for domestic requirements. Edible oil is considered a necessity in Pakistan and hence its demand is relatively inelastic. There are many reasons behind this shortcoming, for example, lack of awareness of farmers, ignorance of policy makers regarding oilseed crops, technological deficiency in oilseed production and smuggling to neighbouring countries (Afghanistan in particular). The major crop responsible for 57 percent of edible oil production is cotton seed which is primarily a fiber crop. Indigenous production of edible oil is below the consumption levels with a very wide gap between the production and consumption. This gap is bridged through import of edible oil worth more than Rs 45.0 billion1 annually. Presently the oilseed production only meet about 30 percent2 of the domestic requirements and the rest is covered with imports. The high dependency on imports not only exerts the pressure on balance of payment but also develops a close linkage between international price shocks and edible oil price in Pakistan which is ultimately reflected in food expenditure. The common Pakistani food includes a significant quantity of edible oil which is the reason behind high consumption growth rates

Human Capital and Economic Growth: The Role of Governance

Economists agree that human capital is an important determinant of economic growth [Arrow (1962); Aghion and Howitt (1992)]. Human capital-led growth generally concludes the positive impact of the two with the help of existing developed theories and empirical evidences. Nonetheless, the standard empirical result of a direct relationship between human capital (however measured) and economic growth, has been criticised on several fronts. First, the impact of other growth-related factors like quality of education, health of the labour force, inflation, corruption, unemployment, rule of law, etc. should not be ignored. These endogenous characteristics of a country are included in Becker‘s (1993) definition of human capital. In addition, as noted by Abramovitz (1986), social capabilities are important in the adoption and diffusion of technologies but countries differ in social capabilities. Therefore, to the extent to which human capital contributes to economic growth through innovation, its effect is conditioned by the country‘s social capabilities which include factors like quality of institutions and governance