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.

Bounds on R-parity violating SUSY Yukawa couplings from semileptonic decays of baryons

We consider tree-level corrections to hypercharge changing semileptonic decays of certain baryons induced by a minimal supersymmetric standard model with explicitly broken R-parity via $L$-violation. This study leads to a new set of constraints on the products of couplings arising from the LQd$^c$ operator of the superpotential.Comment: Latex (8 pages), no figur

"Measuring Capacity Utilization in OECD Countries: A Cointegration Method"

This paper derives measures of potential output and capacity utilization for a number of OECD countries, using a method based on the cointegration relation between output and the capital stock. The intuitive idea is that economic capacity (potential output) is the aspect of output that co-varies with the capital stock over the long run. We show that this notion can be derived from a simple model that allows for a changing capital-capacity ratio in response to partially exogenous, partially embodied, technical change. Our method provides a simple and general procedure for estimating capacity utilization. It also closely replicates a previously developed census-based measure of U.S. manufacturing capacity-utilization. Of particular interest is that our measures of capacity utilization are very different from those based on aggregate production functions, such as the ones provided by the IMF.

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

Photoelectrochemical Detection of Dengue-Related Oligonucleotide Sequence Using Anthocyanin as an Intercalating Agent and Electrochromic Material

World Health Organization (WHO) presupposes a confirmation of dengue virus infection diagnosis with two criteria, i.e. clinical and laboratory criteria. One of the basic methods used by most laboratories to diagnose dengue virus is to detect oligonucleotide sequence using a DNA amplification technique. In this research, the measurement of denguerelated oligonucleotide was conducted by photoelectrochemical method. The presence of oligonucleotide sequence in target DNA can be detected by DNA probe that is immobilized on TiO2 electrode. The DNA hybrid is then bound to electrochromic substance like anthocyanin that generates current when it is subjected to light. The photocurrent is directly proportional to the number of target DNA. The aim of this research is to obtain photoelectrochemical system that has sensitivity and high responsiveness toward the change in oligonucleotide concentration, especially the applicability of anthocyanin as a electrochromic substance and intercalating agent. Linearity (R2) generated from the change of current in response to concentration changes of target DNA (in the concentration range of 0.75–3.00 nM) is 0.9611. Thus, this method has the potential to be developed to detect the presence of dengue virus in biological sample

Schematic Representation: How Students Creating IT?

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan proses terbentuknya representasi skematis murni dan representasi skematis campuran yang diciptakan oleh siswa selama menyelesaikan word problem. Jenis penelitian yang digunakan adalah kualitatif yang bersifat deskriprif. Dalam penelitian ini melibatkan 45 siswa kelas 8. Sedangkan untuk memilih subjek tidak dipilih secara acak, namun dipilih berdasarkan kemampuan siswa dalam menciptkan representasi skematik. Pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan meminta siswa untuk menyelesaikan Tugas Pemecahan Masalah secara think aload, yaitu siswa diminta untuk menyuarakan apa yang dipikirkannya. Selain itu siswa juga menuangkan pikirannya mengunakan kertas dan pensil. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa proses representasi skematis murni diciptakan siswa dengan membuat gambar skema berupa garis besar dari masalah dan dilengkapi dengan beberapa keterangan pokok yang ada dalam masalah. Sedangkan proses representasi skematis campuran diciptakan siswa dengan membuat gambar skema yang dilengkapi dengan keterangan-keterangan dan gambar nyata yang sesuai dengan situasi dalam masalah. Kedua jenis representasi skematis ini sangat efektif dalam membantu siswa dalam menyelesaikan word problem