Pro-poor growth across different agro-climatic zones of rural Pakistan

Prevalence of high rural poverty with spatial distribution necessitates tracking of growth distribution dynamics across different cropping zones to work out precisely the accrual of growth benefits across different regions and segments of population to frame specific policies for sustained growth and effective poverty reduction in pakistan. this paper for the first time disaggregates poverty equivalent growth index (pegr) at the most disaggregated level of different agro-climatic zones of pakistan to measure growth pro-poorness in both relative and absolute terms. results summarize variant growth pattern,relatively high poverty concentration among non-farming rural households despite relatively larger net real growth,more reduction in poverty among farming households and largest contribution to overall rural poverty by major cropping zones. pegr analysis for overall studied period shows pro-poorness of growth in relative terms for the majority of agro-climatic zones due to reinforcing effect of declining relative inequality to positive growth effect,except for mixed (ii) and rain-fed punjab (v) zones. contrarily,anti-pro poor pattern of growth is observed for majority of the zones in absolute terms with the exception of rice/other sind (vii) and baluchistan (ix). however,considerable volatility in the quality of growth has emerged during different sub-periods over the time. high (low) growth periods are largely found to be anti-poor (pro-poor) while negative growth turned to be poverty reducing pro-poor in certain cases. the findings explicitly identify the negative role of resource inequalities on poverty reduction in areas of major cropping zones during high growth scenarios due to highly skewed regional distribution of irrigated land. © 2015 university of agriculture. all rights reserved.