Sort by:
Showing all content in Pakistan
-
Project
Responsive policymaking in Pakistan: Decision-making around infrastructure in Balochistan
IGC Pakistan is supporting the Government of Balochistan (GoB) in developing the contours of a spatial strategy to guide the province's budgetary allocations and development priorities while reflecting Balochistan’s needs and strengths. A previous IGC study has helped set the context for a new framework for growth in Balochistan based on a spatial and data-driven approach...
-
Publication - Policy Brief
How to regulate exposure to air pollution
Airborne particulates kill millions of people each year. Analysis of global data describing particulate exposure suggests that an important component of exposure is determined by country-level policies. Statistically, the three best predictors of mean particulate exposure in a country are: Coal consumption, organic fuel consumption/agricultural burning, and urban...
-
Project
Rebuilding the social compact: Urban service delivery and property taxes in Pakistan
Developing countries face a critical challenge as they urbanise: how can local governments tasked with delivering public goods and services meet the needs of rapidly growing urban populations? We ask whether strengthening the link between urban service provision and tax collection can create a virtuous cycle of sustainable development. We introduce a series of...
-
Project
Reducing Pakistan's circular debt: Facilitating growth through energy sector reforms
Pakistan's power sector is in crisis. Although subsidies protect consumers from the real costs, the government is burdened with serious debt. The stock of debt in the power sector has reached a staggering ~1.72 trillion rupees (£8.56bn), nearly 4% of GDP. In comparison, Pakistan spends just over 2.4% of GDP on education; more is spent on subsidising electricity prices each...
-
Project
Reinventing Pakistan's welfare state: Replacing energy subsidies with targeted transfers
A welfare state faces two fundamental challenges: targeting people who need support the most and delivering the benefits in a cost-effective manner. In some developing countries, weak data leads to poor targeting, while weak institutions lead to poor delivery mechanisms. This means that these limited benefits are often availed by the less deserving, leaving less behind for...
-
Project
Urban property tax reform in Punjab
The Punjab Government is considering reforming its property tax valuation system and is analysing the impact of potentially shifting from the ARV-based system of property valuation to a capital value-based valuation system. Specifically, the government requires support in understanding the distributional and revenue consequences of this shift. Amongst the levers of tax...
-
Publication - Working Paper
Persuasion and public health: Evidence from an experiment with religious leaders during COVID-19 in Pakistan
We use a Randomised Controlled Trial in Pakistan to test whether one-on-one engagement with community religious leaders can encourage them to instruct congregants to comply with public health guidelines when attending religious gatherings. Treated religious leaders are 25% more likely to tell a "mystery shopper" he must wear a mask to attend. Treatment effects are driven...
-
Project
Leveraging public-private partnerships for service delivery in Pakistan
Citizens' expectations for the government to deliver increasingly complex services has grown considerably, which has also exposed serious limitations of the current governance system to deliver these services. A method of bridging the gap between demand and delivery in Punjab was through the creation of public sector companies, licensed under Section 42 of the Companies...
-
Project
The design of anti-poverty interventions for the ultra-poor: Asset transfers or cash transfers?
A major challenge faced by governments in low-income countries is to permanently alleviate households from poverty. Recent evidence suggests that the “Targeting the Ultrapoor” (TUP) program pioneered by BRAC in Bangladesh has proven effective and portable across settings (Banerjee et al., 2015; Bandiera et al., 2017). As a result, there has been growing interest in the...
-
Publication - Policy Brief
Improving public services: A case study of two not-for-profit companies in Punjab
Over the past decade, the Government of Punjab set up a number of government-owned public companies under Section 42 of the Companies Act 2017 to deliver specific public services such as waste management, public transport, infrastructure development, and skills training with the legal and financial autonomy necessary for efficiency and transparency. The experience...