Poverty is not an accident of fate. It is shaped by government institutions and government policy. That is the consistent message from Nobel laureates — Theodore Schultz (1979), Robert Solow (1987), Douglass North (1993), Amartya Sen (1998), Joseph Stiglitz (2001), Elinor Ostrom (2009), Angus Deaton (2015), and Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2019).

According to Government of Pakistan, Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, around 50 million Pakistanis were living below the poverty line in 2018. By 2024, that number had risen to roughly 70 million.

Red alert: Poverty in Pakistan is not cyclical — it is structural.

In 2018, the average electricity tariff hovered around Rs11 per unit. Today, households are paying around Rs50 per unit. That is not an adjustment. That is a structural shock. When electricity becomes four times more expensive – food becomes expensive, real wages fall, manufacturing........

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