Islamabad, June 22, 2006 – The World Bank has validated the Government of Pakistan’s poverty estimates as recently published in the Pakistan Economic Survey, 2005-06.  The Government has maintained consistency with past measures using the same poverty line and inflation indices as used for the 2000-01 estimates.  Using this same methodology, the latest Government estimates show poverty to have fallen from 34.4% to 24%.
 

             A World Bank spokesperson said that several international agencies, including the World Bank have validated this result independently.  “It is clear that poverty has indeed fallen sharply between 2000-01 and 2004-05.  Of course, there are other ways to calculate poverty estimates useful for analytical purposes but maintaining the same methodology for the official estimates is important to maintain comparability over years, “the spokesperson said”.
 

              These most recent estimations have pointed out weaknesses in the inflation indices used for the calculations, which should be strengthened over time.