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From:
Vision21 <vision21newsletter@yahoo.com> Date: Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:00 PM
Subject: Special Report on Pakistan
To:
shahzad.shameem@gmail.com | |
Special Report on Pakistan |
| Natural catastrophes have shown up the depth of poverty in Pakistan |
| | Poverty: Always with us
THREE TIMES IN recent years Pakistan has suffered from cataclysmic disasters. The earthquake that struck Kashmir in October 2005 killed over 70,000 people and made 3m homeless. In 2010 the Indus river spilled over its banks, flooding one-fifth of the country and affecting 20m people. More than 1,700 people lost their lives. The following year unusually heavy rains-one monsoon's-worth in a day-brought renewed flooding in Sindh and Balochistan. Of the inundated area, 35% had also been flooded the year before. Over 5m people were affected.
On each occasion appeals for emergency aid were launched, but by 2011 the response was tepid. That may have been because there were so many competing disasters elsewhere, or because the world was weary of Pakistan's woes. But it also reflected some donors' exasperation with the government's handling of the crisis. The economic impact of these disasters was not as great as might be expected. In 2005, the earthquake year, Pakistan's GDP grew by 7.7%, one of its best-ever performances. The floods in 2010 and 2011 had a big impact on people's lives, but again did not dent overall growth that much. In 2010, according to the State Bank, 6.6m workers were unemployed for two to three months and capital stock worth $2.6 billion, or 1.2% of GDP, was destroyed. But agriculture recovered remarkably quickly, with a bumper winter-wheat crop; and, buoyed by the high cotton price, so did textile exports, despite the waterlogging. The ministry of finance estimated that the huge but somewhat less catastrophic floods in 2011 would shave just 0.5 percentage points off growth for the fiscal year ending in June 2012. The relatively small macroeconomic impact of these disasters reflects the extraordinary resilience of rural Pakistan. It is also a tribute to the international aid effort and to the work of the army and Pakistani charities. One factor mitigating the government's desperately low tax take is that Pakistan has one of the highest rates of private charitable donations in the world-almost 5% of GDP. |
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Shahzad Shameem --
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