An introduction to the 1998-99 Pakistan socioeconomic survey (PSES)

This brief paper is quite focused. It describes the methodology and scope of the household survey carried out by the PIDE between March and July 1999, with an aim to generate nationally representative data to examine the incidence of poverty and distribution of income. It also includes information on household composition, schooling, labour market, sources of income, credit, fertility, child mortality, health, and nutrition. The next section outlines the objectives of the household survey, followed by the design of the survey as proposed in the MIMAP project. The modified design is presented in Section 4, followed by a discussion on the seasonality in Section 5. The contents of the questionnaire are discussed briefly in Section 6. A brief description of the experience of pre-testing the questionnaire is the subject matter of the next section. Nature of the training imparted to field enumerators is reported in Section 8. The processing of data and scope of the survey are discussed respectively in Sections 9 and 10. The sample characteristics are reported in the last section.