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This paper aims to analyze the water, sanitation, and malnutrition situation in Pakistan and to evaluate the sustainable development goals situation. To find the association, this study applies a chi-square test utilizing a sample of 3,575 children of age less than five years, extracted from the data of Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) 2017-18. The results of chi-square show that underweight and stunting have a significant association with water and sanitation in Pakistan. Pakistan's progress in sustainable development goals is yet slow, especially targets of goal 3 and goal 6, which are far behind other countries of the region. The study concludes that there is a need to allocate more resources in programs such as water, sanitation, nutrition, and poverty reduction to uplift the socio-economic standard of the common folk.

Remittances are a significant source of foreign income in Pakistan. In order to maintain the level of remittances stables there is need to explore the significant determinants of worker’s remittances.  Therefore, LASSO technique is adopted to define the potential features of worker remittances. ARDL bound test has been applied to explore the long run and short run effect of potential determinants on workers’ remittances. The results suggest in the long run the internal conflicts and investment return of Pakistan have negative, whereas, the real effective exchange rate, external conflicts and major agricultural crops have positive impact on workers’ remittances of Pakistan.

This study employs the Mundell (1963) and Fleming (1962) traditional flow model of exchange rate to examine the long run behaviour of rupee/US $ exchange rate for Pakistan economy over the period 1982:Q1 to 2010:Q2. This study investigates the effect of output levels, interest rates and prices and different shocks on exchange rate. Hylleberg, Engle, Granger, and Yoo (HEGY) (1990) unit root test confirms the presence of non-seasonal unit root and finds no evidence of biannual and annual frequency unit root in the level of series. Johansen and Juselious (1988, 1992) likelihood ratio test indicates three long-run cointegrating vectors. Cointegrating vectors are uniquely identified by imposing structural economic restrictions on purchasing power parity (PPP), uncovered interest parity (UIP) and current account balance. Finally, the short-run dynamic error correction model is estimated on the basis of identified cointegrated vectors. The speed of adjustment coefficient indicates that 17 percent of divergence from long-run equilibrium exchange rate path is being corrected in each quarter. US war with Afghanistan has significant impact on rupee in short run because of high inflows of US aid to Pakistan after 9/11. Finally, the parsimonious short run dynamic error correction model is able to beat the naïve random walk model at out of sample forecasting horizons. JEL Classification: F31, F37, F47 Keywords: Exchange Rate Determination, Keynesian Model, Cointegration, Out of Sample Forecasting, Random Walk Model

This study examines the spatial dependence, direct and indirect effects of fiscal decentralisation on the provincial economic growth of Pakistan. Due to spatial dependence, spatial econometric technique is applied on the augmented growth of Mankiw, et al. (1992) by incorporating the fiscal decentralisation variable in the theoretical framework. The empirical analysis is based on the spatial panel data set, which is used from 1990 to 2011 of provinces. Model is selected on basis of specific to general and general to specific approach, and decided two-way fixed effects Spatial Durbin model (SDM) is appropriate for our data. We have estimated the SDM by maximum likelihood (bias corrected and random effect) estimation technique, otherwise, if we applied OLS and ignore the spillover effect which makes our estimated parameters biased and inconsistent. Results show that revenue decentralisation has positive, while expenditure decentralisation has negative effect to provincial economic growth. Spillover effects are found to be significant in case of revenue decentralisation and insignificant in case of expenditure. Negative and insignificant spillover effect of expenditure decentralisation is due to weak institutions, lack of intra governmental competition, and absence of political vision which may increase the level of corruption and less accountability. On the basis of econometric analysis, it may be suggested that federal government should transfer the resources to provinces as determined in the 18th amendment, and it is the responsibility of provincial government to train their officials in the area of professional ethics, technical and administrative skills by different programmes. JEL Classification: C31, C33, H3, H50 Keywords: Fiscal Decentralisation, Spatial Econometrics, Revenue, Expenditure