THE recent World Bank Pakistan Development Update, released at the end of October 2025, claims that poverty fell in 2024-25. This assertion raises troubling questions, especially since Pakistan’s poverty assessment report, published just a few months earlier by the World Bank, presented a very grim picture. It stated, “Pakistan’s once promising poverty reduction trajectory has come to a troubling halt, reversing years of hard-fought gains.” The report indicated a return to rising poverty, as their estimates after 2022/23 showed.
More importantly, the earlier World Bank poverty assessment stressed that the economic model responsible for reducing poverty from 64.3 per cent in 2001 to 21.9pc in 2018 “had reached its
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