Trends in Absolute Poverty in Pakistan: 1990-91 and 2001

Poverty, defined comprehensively as absence of options to shape one’s life according to one’s own preferences, comes closer to the concept of human development as presented in UNDP’s Human Development Reports. Absolute poverty, on the contrary, defines poverty in terms of satisfaction of minimum physical needs of food and non-food items to enable people at the lower end of income distribution to engage in economic activity. From the vantage point of the policy-maker concerned with alleviation of poverty, it is crucial to know the magnitude of the existing level of poverty and identify the policy determinants of poverty as well as constraints standing in the way of an effective attack on the worst forms of absolute poverty. In Pakistan, like many other developing countries, poverty has emerged as a core issue on the policy agenda. The traditional measures of poverty—headcount, severity and poverty gap indicate that the incidence of poverty during the previous decade have shown no sign of poverty abatement despite numerous policy and institutional initiatives undertaken by the government. The debate on trends in poverty during the 1990s—an era of stabilisation and structural adjustment has been wide-ranging in Pakistan. However, there is no consensus on the poverty outcomes from the policy and institutional reforms. Primarily due to non-availability of basic data, the last year for which poverty estimates are available is 1998-99. In view of the need to monitor poverty trends and continuously evaluate the efficacy of policies adopted by the government under the poverty reduction strategy, it is important to evolve a consensus on the use of a consistent poverty line, sources of data and data adjustments for measuring poverty. It is this policy context that has guided us to use a consistent definition of poverty line.

Landlessness and Rural Poverty in Pakistan

Although reducing rural poverty has been the key agenda of economic reforms in Pakistan, the rural poverty continued to rise during the 1990s. The causes of rural poverty are complex and multidimensional. The rural poor are quite diverse both in the problems they face, and the possible solutions to these problems are also different. The paper uses the most recent household data set available—PIHS 2001-02—to examine the causes of rural poverty, as to what accounts for its persistence and what policy measures should be taken to alleviate it. Poverty estimates using official poverty line suggest the high prevalence of rural poverty ranging from 39 percent to 48 percent in all provinces. Rural poverty is found to be strongly correlated with lack of asset in rural areas. The unequal land ownership in the country is found to be one of the major causes of rural poverty, as poverty level was the highest among the landless households followed by non-agriculture households. The incidence of landlessness is common in rural areas. About 67 percent households own no land in the country. Unusually, just 0.3 percent households own 55 and above acres of land across the country, suggesting a highly skewed landownership pattern. Gini Coefficient of landholding suggests that Punjab has the most unequal landownership pattern, followed by the NWFP, Sindh, and Balochistan. The highly unequal land distribution seems to have resulted in tenancy arrangements such as sharecropping, resulting in high prevalence of absolute poverty particularly in Sindh. A broad-based land reform programme, including land redistribution and fair and enforceable tenancy contracts together with rural public works programmes and access to credit, is critical to reducing rural poverty in Pakistan.Poverty, Pakistan

Trends in Absolute Poverty in Pakistan: 1990-91 and 2001

Poverty, defined comprehensively as absence of options to shape one’s life according to one’s own preferences, comes closer to the concept of human development as presented in UNDP’s Human Development Reports. Absolute poverty, on the contrary, defines poverty in terms of satisfaction of minimum physical needs of food and non-food items to enable people at the lower end of income distribution to engage in economic activity. From the vantage point of the policy-maker concerned with alleviation of poverty, it is crucial to know the magnitude of the existing level of poverty and identify the policy determinants of poverty as well as constraints standing in the way of an effective attack on the worst forms of absolute poverty. In Pakistan, like many other developing countries, poverty has emerged as a core issue on the policy agenda. The traditional measures of poverty—headcount, severity and poverty gap indicate that the incidence of poverty during the previous decade have shown no sign of poverty abatement despite numerous policy and institutional initiatives undertaken by the government. The debate on trends in poverty during the 1990s—an era of stabilisation and structural adjustment has been wide-ranging in Pakistan. However, there is no consensus on the poverty outcomes from the policy and institutional reforms. Primarily due to non-availability of basic data, the last year for which poverty estimates are available is 1998-99

Association between circulating adiponectin levels and polycystic ovarian syndrome

Background: Low adiponectin levels in polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) have been largely attributed to obesity which is common among these patients. In addition, evidence also suggests that low adiponectin in PCOS may be related to insulin resistance (IR) in these women. However, studies on the role of adiponectin in younger and lean patients are limited. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine the association of adiponectin levels in young and lean women with PCOS.<p></p> Methods: A case–control study was conducted at the Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan. Cases were 75 patients of PCOS with Body Mass Index (BMI) &23 aged 16–35 years and 75 healthy age and BMI matched controls were selected from family and friends of the cases. Demographic details, family history and past medical history were obtained through interview by a physician. Anthropometric measurements included weight and height of the participants. Fasting glucose, total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), insulin, adiponectin, and androgen levels were determined. IR was calculated using homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). Logistic regression models were used to assess the association between adiponectin and PCOS after adjusting for co-variates.<p></p> Results: On multivariable analysis, PCOS cases were 3.2 times more likely to have low adiponectin level (OR = 3.2, 95% CI 1.49-6.90, p-value 0.003) compared to the controls after adjustment for age, BMI, family history, marital status, total cholesterol, HDL level and IR. Females with a family history of PCOS were significantly more likely to have lower adiponectin (OR = 3.32, 95% CI 1.27-8.67, p-value 0.014) compared to those who did not have a family history of PCOS. The associations of IR and family history with low adiponectin level also remained statistically significant after adjustments for covariates.<p></p> Conclusion: Serum adiponectin levels are independently associated with PCOS and are only partly explained by IR. Adiponectin level may serve as a potential independent biomarker for diagnosis of PCOS in young and lean women with fewer symptoms, or women with a family history of PCOS

Geographical Forwarding Methods in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks are new and emerging technology and special class of mobile ad hoc networks that provide wireless communication between vehicles without any fixed infrastructure. Geographical routing has appeared as one of the most scalable and competent routing schemes for vehicular networks. A number of strategies have been proposed for forwarding the packets in geographical direction of the destination, where information of direct neighbors is gained through navigational services. Due to dynamically changing topologies and high mobility neighbor information become outdated. To address these common issues in network different types of forwarding strategies have been proposed. In this review paper, we concentrate on beaconless forwarding methods and their forwarding methods in detail

Landlessness and Rural Poverty in Pakistan

Poverty imposes a repressive weight on Pakistan particularly in rural areas where almost one third of population and majority of the poor live. Although poverty has declined during the 1970s and 1980s, the absolute number of poor has increased substantially since the 1960s. Despite a number of policy initiatives and programmes undertaken for poverty alleviation by various governments, absolute poverty particularly in rural areas continued to rise in Pakistan during the 1990s. Much has been written about poverty in Pakistan so far. A number of attempts have been made by various authors/institutions to estimate the rural poverty in Pakistan in the 1990s. Discussions have remained limited to estimating the regional and provincial trends for rural poverty in Pakistan. Although landlessness and rural poverty in Pakistan received significant attention in the 1970 and 1980, discussions on this issue remained limited in the 1990s. Landlessness and rural poverty are closely linked since land is a principal asset in a rural economy like Pakistan. Landlessness to agricultural land is considered to be the most important contributor to rural poverty. A high concentration of landownership is a major constraint to agricultural growth and alleviation of poverty. There is a general perception that highly skewed distribution of land in Pakistan is one of the important causes of widespread poverty particularly in rural areas

An Improved Algorithm for Optimal Solution of Unbalanced Transportation Problems

Unbalanced transportation problems are particular kind of transportation problems, but an optimal solution is hard to find for unbalanced transportation problems. Still there is a need for minimizing the transportation cost. Unbalanced–TP deals with two different cases, (i) Excess of accessibility  (ii) Deficiency in accessibility  here in this paper both the cases for getting better optimal solution are discussed. Proposed algorithm is based on dummy rows and dummy columns, by taking the absolute differences (penalty) of Initial & Last cost cells of each row/column in transportation cost-matrix, where the objective function is to find an optimal solution. This method is easy to understand and apply than the other existing methods using Initial Basic Feasible Solution–IBFS. Therefore, the proposed method is very helpful to get optimal solution for unbalanced transportation problems. Keywords:Initial Basic Feasible Solution–IBFS, Unbalanced Transportation Problems, Dummy Rows & Dummy Columns, Optimal Solution. DOI: 10.7176/MTM/10-8-02 Publication date: December 31st 202

Wireless sensor network performance analysis and effect of blackhole and sinkhole attacks

The widespread usage of Wireless sensor networks in various fields and application make it vulnerable to variety of security threats and attacks. These security attacks occur when an adversary compromised a sensor node by inject false measurements and divert real time network traffic. Sinkhole and Blackhole attacks are very common attacks in network, where an attacker advertises un-authorized routing update in network. To deal with these types of attacks, there is a need to tighten the network security and prevent from attackers. In this study, we discuss security threats and presents the effects of Black and Sink hole attacks. Further, the study presents related work and current issues in wireless sensor network. The simulation results illustrated that, how these attacks affect the network performance