Impediments to Social Development in Pakistan

The development of infrastructure and the provision of basic services in Pakistan lie in the public domain. The quality of the built infrastructure and the service offered reflect successive governments’ capability as a channel for public sector funds, their role in overall financial and macro-economic planning and management, and their administrative efficiency in implementation, operations and management—in essence the extent to which they are able to adhere to the principles of good and humane governance. Good governance is generally conceived of as the judicious exercise of economic, political and administrative authority in the public and private spheres to manage a country’s affairs at all levels to improve the quality of life of the people. It is a continuing process where divergent opinions and desires are satisfied through compromise and tolerance in a spirit of cooperative action for the mutual benefit of the larger whole. It has three dimensions: one, the political regime; two, the systems and procedures for exercising authority; and three, the capacity of governments [World Bank (1994); UNDP (1997); OECD (1995); Commission on Global Governance (1995)]. When Pakistan gained political freedom in August 1947, it inherited an economic and social infrastructure unable to meet the demands of the large influx of refugees from India. Five decades later, policies emphasising public investment, subsidised credit and regulated private sector development have generated strong economic growth, but failed to implement successful social development. Over the last 50 years and more Pakistan’s economy, measured through its GDP, has grown by more than 10 times, an average annual growth rate of 5.1 percent. Rapid population growth, estimated to have averaged just under 3 percent annually, has resulted in real per capita increases of only 2.1 percent per year.

Gender Differentials in the Cost of Primary Education: A Study of Pakistan

The paper examines the differences in the cost of primary education by gender and by province. It shows that the growth in enrolment outstrips the growth in the relevant population cohort, except in Sindh, and that this is faster in the case of girls than boys; that the school construction programme for girls in Sindh, unlike other provinces, outstrips the growth in female teacher employment. This is also seen in the boys’ school in Pakistan. Cost of providing education are a function of the availability of teachers and schools, opportunity cost of employment, urbanisation and female literacy. The growth in both recurring and capital outlays and in output costs per student are higher for girls and boys except in Balochistan. Using a pooled time series and analysis the paper concludes that there is an optimal level for the availability of schools per 1000 population [6.02 and 5.67 respectively for girls and boys in the Punjab and 3.88 for boys in NWFP and Balochistan] and for the number of teachers per 1000 students [7.69 for girls and 3.36 for boys]. It suggests the policy prescription to reallocate resources to employing more teachers for boys for greater cost effectiveness.

Governance, Decentralisation, and Poverty: The Case of Pakistan

Human development and human rights share a common vision and purpose: to secure the freedom, well being and dignity of humanity. Human development is as essential for human rights as the latter is for the former. Historical evidence suggests that the more civilised societies were those that gave a higher priority to both, for example, the Greek, the Roman and the enlightened years of early Islam. The freedom from want is perhaps the one inalienable right of humanity which stands between dignity and indignity and which must be mitigated against by both state and individual.1 For the first time in history mankind adopted these and other human rights when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Today all but one of the six core covenants and conventions have been ratified by at least 140 countries and state sponsored anti-poverty programmes were initiated globally, most with the help of civil society [UNDP (2000)]. The lessons from history clearly establish that for improving the social endowment of the poor the state and the individual are key players, money is a necessary requirement, good governance is critical to success and the participation of each component of society as a whole ensures sustainability and continued benefits beyond the initial attempts to mitigate the impact of poverty. In other words decentralisation is a key element to improve the lot of the people, particularly the poor and the disenfranchised.

Maximizing Expected Achievable Rates for Block-Fading Buffer-Aided Relay Channels

© 2002-2012 IEEE. In this paper, the long-term average achievable rate over block-fading buffer-aided relay channels is maximized using a hybrid scheme that combines three essential transmission strategies, which are decode-and-forward, compress-and-forward, and direct transmission. The proposed hybrid scheme is dynamically adapted based on the channel state information. The integration and optimization of these three strategies provide a more generic and fundamental solution and give better achievable rates than the known schemes in the literature. Despite the large number of optimization variables, the proposed hybrid scheme can be optimized using simple closed-form formulas that are easy to apply in practical relay systems. This includes adjusting the transmission rate and compression when compress-and-forward is the selected strategy based on the channel conditions. Furthermore, in this paper, the hybrid scheme is applied to three different models of the Gaussian block-fading buffer-aided relay channels, depending on whether the relay is half or full duplex and whether the source and the relay have orthogonal or non-orthogonal channel access. Several numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the achievable rate results and compare them to the upper bounds of the ergodic capacity for each one of the three channel models under consideration

Perinatal arterial ischaemic stroke: an update with literature review

Perinatal arterial ischaemic strokes are a major cause of morbidity in the neonatal period and leads to significant neurological morbidity. It is however under recognized as an entity and usually missed till the baby is 3-4 months of age when they first present with hemiplegia. Perinatal arterial ischaemic strokes are not reported from our country and this may be due to the fact that neurodiagnostic modalities were not available until the last few years. Even now this is not available in the smaller cities of our country. In this review we will discuss the common issues related to etiology and pathogenesis in perinatal arterial ischaemic stroke. The management and the prognosis are also reviewed especially discussing the factors that affect the long term prognosis

Stylised Facts of Household Savings: Findings from the HIES 1993-94

Saving, the fraction of national income that is not spent on current consumption, has long been widely regarded as a key factor in economic growth.' The saving rate along with the incremental capital-output ratio determine the growth rate of the economy in the Harrod-Domar Model framework. The critical role of saving in capital accumulation and economic development is also recognised in the "two-gap" and classical growth models. For capital accumulation to result in sustained growth, it must be supported by adequate domestic/national savings. This has been clearly demonstrated by the extra-ordinary performance of the East Asian economies. While there have been brief periods of significant inflow of external financial resources to some developing countries in the past, foreign savings cannot be expected to provide a sustainable basis for financing domestic investment. Raising national saving rate is particularly essential to developing countries with a heavy debt service burden and limited capacity to obtain loans in foreign capital markets. The 1995 Mexican crisis showed, among other things, that low domestic savings can raise the probability of sudden capital outflows, and sharpen their negative consequences. In a financially integrated world, high national/domestic savings contribute to macro economic stability which is itself a powerful growth factor. Indeed, any macro economic adjustment programmes oriented to the resumption of long-run growth invariably emphasise the need to expand domestic savings.

The ESO UVES Advanced Data Products Quasar Sample - VI. Sub-Damped Lyman-α\alpha Metallicity Measurements and the Circum-Galactic Medium

The Circum-Galactic Medium (CGM) can be probed through the analysis of absorbing systems in the line-of-sight to bright background quasars. We present measurements of the metallicity of a new sample of 15 sub-damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorbers (sub-DLAs, defined as absorbers with 19.0 < log N(H I) < 20.3) with redshift 0.584 < $\rm z_{abs}$ < 3.104 from the ESO Ultra-Violet Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) Advanced Data Products Quasar Sample (EUADP). We combine these results with other measurements from the literature to produce a compilation of metallicity measurements for 92 sub-DLAs as well as a sample of 362 DLAs. We apply a multi-element analysis to quantify the amount of dust in these two classes of systems. We find that either the element depletion patterns in these systems differ from the Galactic depletion patterns or they have a different nucleosynthetic history than our own Galaxy. We propose a new method to derive the velocity width of absorption profiles, using the modeled Voigt profile features. The correlation between the velocity width delta_V90 of the absorption profile and the metallicity is found to be tighter for DLAs than for sub-DLAs. We report hints of a bimodal distribution in the [Fe/H] metallicity of low redshift (z < 1.25) sub-DLAs, which is unseen at higher redshifts. This feature can be interpreted as a signature from the metal-poor, accreting gas and the metal-rich, outflowing gas, both being traced by sub-DLAs at low redshifts.Comment: 64 pages, 31 figures, 27 tables. Submitted to MNRA