Economic and Social Progress under Civilian & Military Set-ups in Pakistan

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to analyze the social indicators of two government eras i.e. the military regime of General Pervaiz Musharraf (FY00-FY05) and the democratic governments of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Muslim League (FY89-FY99). Since the social indicators are the benchmark & performance factors for having an ease and well being of a common person for any country. The objectives of the study are two fold. First of all, it is to develop a statistical framework of analysis to compare the performance in social sectors of Pakistan during two different types of governments; namely, the democratic era (FY89-FY99) and Military regime (FY00-FY05). Descriptive & Inferential statistics were used over a period of time 1989-2005 to analyze the difference in Group Means of the time period as opposed to comparing them from one year to another, which is the conventional method. The findings indicate that amongst the key social indicators and variables there is no significant statistical difference in the group means for most of the variables studied. Therefore, the main conclusion of this study is that the military regime (FY00-FY05) has not performed significantly better than the previous regimes in the democratic era (FY89-FY99) as indicated by key social indicators. The overall quality of life in terms of the development of the social sectors i.e., education, health, and poverty has not changed at all during the military rule (FY00-FY05) as compared to the previous democratic era (FY89-FY99). In fact it has been observed that most of the Social indicators of the military era (FY00-FY05) remained stagnant or even more worsened as compared to the democratic governments (FY89-FY99).

Keywords: Social indicators, Military regime, Democratic regime, Statistical framework, Descriptive & inferential statistics, Social sectors, Social performance