14 pieces across 2 issues. The archive lists them issue by issue.
The issue's lead: one argument, carried by the data, at length.
Taxes reach Pakistan's households through everyday purchases as well as earnings. Using the 2024–25 household survey and that year's tax rules, we estimate how selected taxes, cash assistance and electricity support vary with living standards and income source. The results show a burden that rises with spending, largely because of salary tax, but is broadly flat across most of the income distribution.
Export-led growth is the right ambition, but the engine that will deliver it never gets built. Two new household surveys show why.
A single question answered with a chart or two and a clear finding.
Millions of Pakistanis face long journeys to a health facility. Longer journeys are associated with fewer births taking place in a facility. What shorter journeys would mean for newborn survival is less certain.
Between 2018–19 and 2024–25, average household spending in the middle of Pakistan’s consumption distribution roughly doubled in rupees, while real spending per person fell by around 5 per cent. The fall reached almost every line of the budget, food included.
Beyond primary level, girls’ government schools are farther away than boys’ schools in three out of four mapped districts. Where girls’ schools are farther away, fewer girls tend to be enrolled.
Female participation in the labour force has climbed three points in four years. Some of that is women going to work; some is the count finally finding them. Neither, yet, is the kind of work that makes the economy more productive.
One chart, three minutes, and what it does and does not show.
Among households with unschooled parents, median consumption is 59 per cent higher where a grown child has a degree than where none attended school. Nevertheless, nearly half of those graduate households still sit below the national median.
Goods exports and remittances tracked each other from 2018 to 2024. Then they diverged: exports stood still but remittances did not.
How a measurement is made, and where it can mislead.
How a grid becomes an estimate of access to care. Follow the calculation, practise population weighting, and learn what a travel-time average can—and cannot—tell you.
Night-time lights promise poverty measurement at any resolution. Information theory — explained here — says when more granular data means more, and when it is only noise.
What the issue is for.
Pakistan’s inequalities run through what the state can collect, whom it can identify and the services it can provide. Where public provision falls short, families must find their own way across.
Why Adaad exists, what it promises each month, and the modest freedom it adds: data free to check, to question and to reuse.
Every indicator in the issue for one district, against its province and the country.
Among Pakistan’s districts the poverty headcount runs from 9.6 per cent in Rawalpindi to 93.8 in Khuzdar, where nearly every poor household lacks clean fuel, sanitation and adequate housing at once. The two components that read low in Khuzdar, water and electricity, are facts about the questionnaire.
Every indicator in this issue for one district, set against its province and the country.