Social Change—The Essence of Development (Keynote Address)

Abstract

This is a critical historical moment, in the 50th year of our independence. Our decisions, commitment and action in the next few years will affect our country for much of the 21st century. The decisions needed would be a challenge for any country: for Pakistan they involve a drastic change in development priorities. Our development efforts since Independence have gone into building the economy. In the early years this was quite successful: we harnessed the great rivers for power and irrigation; we revolutionised agriculture, we pushed exports up to new levels. For a time economic growth was quite dynamic. But we were always aware that something was missing. At Independence Pakistan started more or less even with other countries in the region. All our efforts since then have left us lagging behind. In 1950 the Republic of Korea had about the same GNP per head as Pakistan. Today Korea’s GNP is $7,670; ours $476. That is a difference of 1,611 percent.

Population Growth and Economic Development in Pakistan

“…The coefficient for population growth is negative and significantly different from zero meaning that population 3 It might be pointed out that since we are using time series data, it is quite likely that the underlying variables are nonsatationary and therefore, variables are examined for unit roots, cointegration and error correction; the use of which has become very frequent in the more recent research of economics. Furthermore, time series econometrics techniques primarily deal with large sample.…”

“…This equation was subjected to specification and diagnostic tests [Breusch-Godfrey LM (SC), White Heteroscedasticity (HS), the Jarque and Bera (JB) statistic and Ramsey RESET (FF)]. 3 The Jarque _ Bera (JB) statistic did not reject the hypothesis that the residuals originate from a normal distribution. For residual autocorrelation Breusch-Godfrey LM (SC) test does not reject the hypothesis of no autocorrelation.…”

“…In 1947, a million people were added every year or so but today we are adding a million every three months. No conceivable development plan can sustain such a rate of population growth [3]. This evidence makes obvious the nature and severity of population problem.…”