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Home > Research
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Research-Initiative for Economic Research in Pakistan (IERP)
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Initiative for Economic Research in Pakistan (IERP) is envisaged as a network
of leading Pakistani Economists and practitioners with diverse backgrounds and views.
This initiative is launched by the Center for Research in Economics and Business at
the Lahore School of Economics and will be jointly headed by Dr. Naved Hamid (Director
Research Center) and Dr. Azam Chaudhry (Dean Economics Department). IERP is intended
not only to provide a platform to leading economic researchers to engage in rigorous
research on pressing economic issues, but also to strengthen research capacity at Lahore School and train students in cutting-edge research methods. |
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Current Research |
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The Current Research section provides an overview of initiated and in progress
research. The abstracts provided here include the question addressed and its
background, findings (if available) and current status of research.more.. |
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The Vision |
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Leading research centers and academic institutions in Pakistan all recognize the
limited capacity and resources available to engage in rigorous economic
research. This initiative identifies an innovative potential route to overcome
the challenges posed by paucity of resources and build sustainable local
research capacity at Lahore School for the future. more... |
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Core Research Teams |
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Having identified the expertise available at the center we have decided to
launch three core teams of research headed by the faculty members at the Lahore
School. One team headed by Dr. Naved will work on development strategy and
policy for Pakistan with a particular focus on trade; a second team headed by
Dr. Azam will work on the role of institutions in economic growth and
macroeconomic modeling; and the third headed by Dr. Theresa Chaudhry will focus
on survey and experimental methods to study various socio-economic issues
confronting Pakistan. These teams will collaborate and engage with leading
researchers in the field to develop capacity and strengthen the ability of the
center to effectively supervise M.Phil theses for the research students. |
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Growth and Development Policy
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In our conversations with a wide range of researchers and practitioners, almost
everyone has agreed at the conceptual level that anti-export bias is a perennial
cause of balance of payments crises and stop-go growth in Pakistan. It is
recognized that there is a need for developing a comprehensive strategy for
escaping this vicious cycle of macroeconomic crises and subsequent painful
adjustments that have a disproportionately adverse effect on the poor segments
of the society. The teams led by Dr. Naved and Dr. Azam will initially
work on the following:
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Analytical studies on the nature and extent of the anti-export bias arising from
an overvalued exchange rate and the poor state of trade facilitation in Pakistan;
and studies on development strategies, complementary macro policies and institutionalized
incentives for moving the country from domestic demand (consumption)-led to export
(balanced)-led growth. |
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Analytical studies on institutionalized constraints
that have resulted in limited diversification of export markets and products; and studies on potential areas of comparative advantage
of Pakistan, particularly to explore newer ideas about comparative
advantage, such as how agglomeration economies (clustering) can create comparative
advantage in industries that were earlier not thought possible for labor-abundant
countries, for instance IT industry in India and surgical instruments in Pakistan. |
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Macroeconomic models for purposes of evaluating policy options, making short-term
economic forecasts, and supporting work on medium-term development strategies.
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Microeconomic Studies: Survey and Experimental Methods
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In the past two decades a lot of public resources supported by donor funds have been committed to social sector
programs in Pakistan but the condition of the poor has not improved with poverty levels stagnating and human development indicators lagging other developing countries with similar levels of income. The group proposes to use experimental
data to study patterns of behavior and evaluate the impact of policy
interventions on both social and economic outcomes. New developments in field
based experimental research have generated promising ideas for evaluating policy
interventions with the help of randomized trials before they are scaled up to the
national level. The Poverty Action Lab at MIT has popularized this approach to field
based testing of policies as the estimates obtained from such randomizations are
free from biases recurrent in retrospective observational studies.
The team proposes to use this approach in designing and evaluating interventions
in public service delivery in Pakistan, especially in the education sector, and
the results from these experiments will be used to inform education policy at the
national level. The research project will help post graduate students at LSE to
better understand the challenges of field based research and use the data collected
for these interventions to empirically test hypotheses for their M.Phil/PhD dissertations.
The long term goal of the project will be to establish collaboration with Poverty
Action Lab at MIT and engage with leading researchers in the field to carry out
impact assessments of microfinance and health policy initiatives. The team aims
to cultivate and develop a network of researchers at the Collective for Social Science
Research, Mahbub-ul-Haq Human Development Center (MHHDC), Punjab Economic Research
Institute (PERI), Social Policy Development Centre (SPDC) and Sustainable Development
Institute (SDPI) to carry out nation-wide field based testing of interventions in
public-service delivery.
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Lahore School of Economics |