ADB says high urban-rural inequalities push ethnic poverty gap to 60 percent

Strongly persistent high inequalities in education and large urban-rural divide have increased the ethnic poverty gap as high as 50 percentage point or more in some specific cases to 60 per cent in Pakistan, according to Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) publication titled "Poverty and Ethnicity in Asian Countries" uploaded on its website on December 8, 2016 stated that the Bank compares the extent and nature of higher prevalence of poverty among disadvantaged ethnic groups in six Asian countries, including Azerbaijan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines and Vietnam, using demographic surveys.
The results show that there is a substantial cross-country variability in the extension, evolution, and nature of the ethnic poverty gap in Pakistan along with India and Nepal. The factors that contribute to ethnic disadvantaged groups being poorer are the strongly persistent high inequalities in education and urban-rural gap Pakistan.
The poverty gap between some ethnic groups is astonishingly large and in some cases, the differential in poverty rates is above 50 or even 60 percentage points for some wealth cut-offs. This is especially the case of Siraiki and other linguistic groups in Pakistan. However, according to the ADB, the Punjabi generally show smaller poverty rates than the Sindhi, Siraiki, and other groups (whose maximum ethnic poverty gap is about 60 percentage points), with Pashto having intermediate gaps.
Both location and socioeconomic factors play a substantial role in shaping ethnic inequalities in poverty levels in Pakistan. Pakistan has high ethnic inequality in access to basic education, which is a determinant factor of the large poverty rates of linguistic disadvantaged groups. The ADB said it might also expect a significant reduction in the ethnic gap by reducing the urban-rural gap through development of rural communities where disadvantaged groups overwhelmingly live. Any policy that aims at reducing the large geographical inequality, thereby, increasing the economic opportunities in the least-developed provinces, is also expected to have an extraordinary impact on closing the ethnic gap.
The characteristic effect also explains the largest part (near 90%) of the observed gap in poverty rates by ethnicity in Pakistan. A large part of this gap is associated with location. In this case, it is the over-representation in rural areas (71% of the eligible population of disadvantaged ethnic groups compared with only 15% of Urdu), the main factor behind the ethnic poverty gap.
The educational gap is also responsible for about one third of the overall gap in poverty (14-17 percentage points). Pakistan resembles India and Nepal in the remarkable importance of the poorer education of the disadvantaged groups, but it also outstands for their concentration in rural areas being associated with their higher poverty. The document noted, "In fact, we have shown that a reduction in geographical inequalities between 2003 and 2008 account for the reduction in the ethnic poverty gap, both absolute and relative, that occurred during that period in this country."