The democratic period of 1998-99 failed to improve the social sector indicators, especially education. Politicians tended to recruit more teachers and doctors than to improve basic facilities of education and health, says a World Bank report.
It says that between 1992 and 2000, the government and the donor community spent a total of $9 billion on the program--two-thirds of this funding went to education, outcome of which was disappointing.
In a recent report titled 'The Politics of Service Delivery in Pakistan: Political Parties and the Incentives for Patronage, 1988-1999', the Bank opines that politicians were involved in this period in patronage of a limited class, ignoring the masses. For them, there has been a trade-off between patronage and social service delivery.
The number of schools increased up to 70 percent, while net enrolment declined. Net primary enrollment rate had declined from 46 percent in 1991/92 to 42 percent in 2001/02, with male enrolments declining from 53 percent to 46 percent, and female from 39 percent to 38 percent.
At the provincial level, educational outcomes for Sindh and in particular Balochistan worsened considerably, while NWFP witnessed a modest increase in enrolments.
There were also significant staffing increases in other sectors, particularly health and police, and the overall size of the provincial bureaucracy increased by 35 percent between 1988 and 2000.
Access to indoor piped drinking water declined from 25 percent to 22 percent, and there were only modest improvements in immunisation coverage and reduction in the incidence of diarrhoea.
Three features of the party system had important bearing on their service delivery: the number of political parties or the degree of fragmentation of the party system; the internal cohesion, or degree of factionalism of political parties; and the degree of ethnic divide or polarisation among political parties.
The higher the levels of party fragmentation, factionalism, and polarisation, the greater the incentives for patronage, and the poorer the quality of service delivery.
While overall social sector expenditures were protected relative to other sectors during the 1990s, intra-sectoral allocations were suboptimal.
Specifically, the construction of new buildings and the hiring of additional staff were prioritised at the expense of providing resources for operations and maintenance.
As the World Development Report 2004 notes, the last three decades witnessed a huge increase in the number of democratic governments in the world, but no concomitant improvements in services for the poor.
Elected politicians in Pakistan appeared to be far more concerned with patronage, or doling out targeted favours to a small number of privileged groups, rather than on providing public goods that would benefit the majority of citizens.
While acknowledging that service delivery was poor across the country, it said that there were important differences in expenditure patterns in education and health, across the four provinces, as well as variations in the quality of sector governance. Specifically, the incentive to focus on recruitment and new infrastructure investments, at the expense of operations and maintenance, and quality improvements were the greatest in Sindh, and less severe in Punjab and NWFP.
Fragmentation and factionalism both exacerbated the informational problems that voters had in assigning credit (blame) for service delivery improvements (deterioration), and thereby created incentives for politicians to focus on targeted benefits.
Polarisation, particularly ethnic polarisation, reduced the ability of groups to agree on the provision of public goods, thereby again causing politicians to favour the delivery of targeted benefits.
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