By our correspondent

KARACHI: Pakistan needs to embark on restructuring social relations and economic policy priorities if it hopes to cut to half poverty by 2015 to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

This was stated by speakers at a panel discussion on poverty reduction at Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST) the other day, with the panelists including VA Jafarey, Qudsia Kadri, Haris Gazdar, Dr Asad Sayeed and Dr Kaiser Bengali.

The interactive discussions brought forth several questions from the audience relating to the sustainability of growth, role of education in sustained growth and the role of democracy in poverty reduction.

Jafarey, who has served as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Governor of the State Bank and Adviser on Finance and Economic Affairs, said that there was a need to study as to which kind of policies and plans would cause trickle-down effect and restructure economic planning accordingly.

A genuine effort at poverty reduction would, he said, require changing prioritisation.

Qudsia Kadri, a local journalist, highlighted the pervasive inequality in incomes between classes and regions and said that growth had to create jobs in order to benefit the poor.

She said that land was unequally distributed, which was a major factor in rural poverty and that the fiscal structure taxed the poor instead of the rich.

Haris Gazdar, a political economist and an expert on poverty, said that there was a need to have a vision of the society to deal with the questions of poverty.

He said that countries as politically diverse as China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam and Thailand had succeeded in reducing poverty to single digits and the common elements among these countries were the creation of a socially egalitarian society, armed with basic education.

Concluding the discussion, Dr Kaiser Bengali, professor of economics at SZABIST, said there was a need to restructure social relations and policy making priorities and reduce the level of inequality in social and economic spheres if the target of reducing poverty by half by 2015 was not to be missed.