Contents

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.