Dynamics of Agricultural Productivity and Poverty in Pakistan

This paper addresses two topics which essentially compliment eachother. The first is the empirical investigation of the relationship betweenaggregate agricultural productivity and poverty in Pakistan through thecourse of time. The second is the estimation of the central inputs ordeterminants of agricultural production, again on an aggregate level andthrough time. The main empirical findings of this research suggest thatincreases in agricultural productivity have alleviated poverty in Pakistan butnot to the extent to which the negative forces of a high population growthand increasing food prices have worsened its incidence. In the case of thedeterminants of agricultural productivity, the results show that accompaniedwith the size of the cropped area, fertiliser off-take has played the mostsignificant and powerful role in increasing agricultural productivity throughtime in Pakistan, especially at the onset of the Green Revolution __ theintroduction of High Yield Variety crops and seeds in the late sixties.