ROLE OF SOCIAL PROTECTION IN POVERTY REDUCTION IN PAKISTAN: A Quantitative Approach.

This paper examines the role of social protection through different channels (education, health, social transfers, subsidies, etc.) which are helpful in reducing poverty in Pakistan. Unlike the existing literature, the paper considers the quantitative model of social protection policies to reduce the poverty. To handle this issue, a time series data set containing thirty-one observations, is used for the period 1982–2012. An Autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) is used to identify the long-run, as well as the short-term relationship between the social protection indicators and the poverty. It is concluded that outreach of social protection via expenditures on education, foreign aid and zakat play a significant role in poverty reduction. Moreover, the autocratic period has proved itself a mechanism to reduce poverty by social protection provisions as compared to the democratic period but remain insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]