Investment Portfolio, Democratic Accountability, Poverty and Income Inequality Nexus in Pakistan: A Way to Social Sustainability

Abstract

Institutions help to streamline the economic activity-related procedures, where government intervention might be involved. Institutions also play a significant role in social sustainability. The findings using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to cointegration for the period from 1984–2019 reveal that investment portfolio and democratic accountability reduce poverty in Pakistan both in the long and short run. Moreover, democratic accountability helps to reduce income inequality, but the investment portfolio’s role is not significant. The literacy rate helps to reduce income inequality, and inflation increases poverty and income inequality. The remittances increase income inequality, and urbanization increases poverty. To eradicate poverty and income inequality, the governments should be accountable for their actions to the general public while they remain in power. If they do not deliver as per their manifestoes, they will not be reelected in the next election. Moreover, there is a dire need to redefine the role of an investment portfolio to reduce the risk of investment. So, investments would increase economic activities and could reduce poverty and income inequality. This study contributes to the literature by inquiring about the role of the investment portfolio and democratic accountability in social sustainability by reducing poverty and income inequality. This study only considers Pakistan’s economy due to limitations of poverty data availability in other countries. The scope could further be broadened by accessing data for a wider Asia region to test the role of the investment portfolio and democratic accountability to reduce poverty and income inequality.

Psychological and environmental empirics of crimes in Pakistan

“…Figures 3 and 4 provide the incidence of crime for a simulated decrease in the CO 2 emission and depression prevalence. The methodology is adapted from Hassan et al (2021), whereby other independent variables are assumed to be at the mean value, and the estimated dependent variables are calculated for new values of one variable. Here we can see that CO 2 emissions tend to have a similar effect on violent and property crime, while depression tends to decrease property crime more than the violent crimes.…”

Income Inequality, Institutions, and Freedom of the Press: Potential Mechanisms and Evidence

“…The study found that democracy had a corrective effect on income distribution in the examined countries. Hassan et al [58] researched the influence of democratic accountability on income inequality and poverty in Pakistan. The outputs exhibited that democratic accountability reduces both income inequality and poverty.…”

Income inequality, consumption, and the debt ratio of Chinese households

“…Using Urban Household Survey data (UHS), Ji [ 11 ] finds that income inequality does have a negative effect on household consumption, but this effect decreases significantly after considering average regional income, mainly because the Gini coefficient is negatively related to average regional income. Hassan et al [ 12 ] theorizes that income inequality affects household consumption through household borrowing, which can increase household consumption in the short term, but undermine sustainable growth in consumption. To investigate wealth and income inequality, Tian and Liu [ 13 ] proposed an inhomogeneous agent-based model where a large number of individual persons (agents) work, consume and invest, and it was revealed that capital (investment) income plays an essential role in producing inequality.…”