Does Fiscal Decentralization Reduce Poverty? An insight from provincial level analysis in Pakistan

Abstract

The present study has been designed to check the effect of fiscal decentralization (FD) on the poverty levels in Pakistan. Three measures of FD, namely intergovernmental transfers, provincial government revenues, and expenditure, are used in this study. Furthermore, the effect of FD is checked on the poverty levels separately in four provinces of Pakistan. Poverty levels are measured with the help of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and the percentage of poor households with a value under 35 according to the International Wealth Index (IWI). This study has used panel data from 1990 to 2020 for the model in which poverty is measured through IWI value. Data from 2004 to 2020 has been used for the model in which poverty is measured through MPI. Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) has been used to obtain the regression results by avoiding the problem of serial correlation and heteroscedasticity. The study's results highlighted that two measures, namely intergovernmental transfers and provincial government expenditures, have a nonlinear relationship with poverty. An increase in intergovernmental transfers and provincial government expenditures reduces poverty at a decreasing rate at first. Then, an increase in both variables results in the form of a higher level of poverty. Moreover, revenue decentralization at the provincial level increases poverty initially and reduces poverty after a critical point.