economics

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Natural Gas Infrastructure and Local Communities in Sindh: A Case of Three Settlements in Sanghar District (2022)

Written by Zeenat Hisam and Ishak Soomro, this 2022 research report was produced by The Knowledge Forum as a part of its programme to promote a narrative on scaling back fossil fuels in Pakistan, with the support of Tara, a regionally-led grant-making initiative to accelerate energy transformation in Asia.

Pakistan is a resource-rich country and the energy sector — driven on the back of fossil-fuel based solutions – has played a major role in fuelling economic growth and development. Extraction of oil and gas requires huge capital, sophisticated technology and highly skilled labour. The first beneficiaries of the extraction are thus the investors, the operating companies and the management (national or global corporations). The larger beneficiaries are the industries and the households, mainly located in urban and industrial areas across the country. Local population living in hydrocarbons-producing regions in Pakistan do not benefit from natural resources lying under their feet and being extracted by outsiders which include provincial and federal governments.

Local economy and local living conditions at many production sites have remained stagnant for decades. The population living in districts with high endowment of natural resources suffer multiple socio-economic deprivations, particularly in the areas of education, health, and employment.

While the dominant narrative in the energy sector, particularly in oil and gas development, is built around probing of technical aspects, scrutiny and analyses of energy production and its benefits, very little documentation in Pakistan captures the experiences of the local communities vis a vis oil and gas industry. Many resource- rich countries make efforts to improve the local economy by leveraging linkages to production projects. The value brought to the local, regional or national economy from an extraction project is referred to as the “local content”. This snapshot study attempts to touch upon the lack of local content in the context of three settlements in the area close to gas fields in Sanghar District Sindh.

View and download the full report here:

Natural Gas Infrastructure and Local Communities in Sindh: A Case of Three Settlements in Sanghar District

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Census Takers

Published in Dawn, April 11th, 2023

The melancholy of having to count souls/ Where they grow fewer and fewer every year. — Census Taker by Robert Frost

THE poem published in 1923 by the American poet captures the solitude of the locale, of diminishing life as farmers left the New England region in droves and headed to the cities in the early 20th century. What have the census takers in Karachi in 2023 felt while counting the people? By all accounts, it was exasperation.

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Nobel Prize and Minimum Wages

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2021.

The Nobel Prize for Economics for the year 2021 awarded to David Card for his contributions to scholarship on minimum wages has vindicated trade unions, labour and human rights advocates and pro-labour economists the world over. Card’s work in 1994 refuted the long-held hypothesis that increases in minimum wage reduces employment. At the time, 90 per cent of professional economists believed that a hike in minimum wage was bad for the economy. In Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, Card and Alan Krueger presented evidence that minimum wage hike has either no effect or a positive effect on employment.

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Census and Labour Data

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2015

A robust national statistical system is pivotal for development, equitable growth and planning as it facilitates evidence-based policies and, judicious and timely decision-making to achieve goals set by the country.

The system comprises official bodies that gather information and statistics through surveys and censuses on diverse aspects such as the economy and labour, demography and sociology, trade and business, politics and culture, housing, health and education, etc.

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GSP-Plus and Labour Compliance

Previously a beneficiary of the tariff cuts under the Generalised System of Preference, Pakistan is one of the 10 countries which have been granted the Generalised System of Preference Plus (GSP-Plus) status by the European Union from January 2014. The GSP-Plus allows developing countries tariff-free export of their products to European markets. Under this special incentive trade arrangement, presumably for ‘sustainable development and good governance’, Pakistan fulfils the criteria for vulnerability. As defined by the EU, vulnerable (in terms of trade) are the countries which lack diversification and insufficient integration within the international trading system.

The GSP-Plus is conditional to ratification of, and compliance to, 27 international standards and covenants on labour, human and women’s rights, environment, narcotics and corruption. These 27 standards comprise eight ILO core labour conventions, six UN conventions/covenants on human rights, and gender and racial discrimination, nine UN conventions/protocols on environment and four UN conventions on narcotics and corruption.

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