Abstract
Policies aimed to eradicate poverty widely depend on the identification of factors that are associated with poverty. The understanding of poverty- generating factors provides meaningful insight to design policies for the emancipation of poverty. The purpose of this paper is to explore correlates of poverty in rural and urban areas of Pakistan. We explored the impact of various household, social and regional factors including dependency ratio, education, inequality and availability of health and education facilities. The results showed that dependency ratio and illiteracy cause poverty. Education, availability of health and education facilities and consumption inequality are found to be negatively associated with poverty. The rural-urban comparison revealed that for poverty eradication, education is relatively more effective in urban areas while the dependency ratio is more detrimental in rural areas. The impact of social factors on poverty depicts more reduction in urban poverty due to the availability of better health and educational facilities in these areas. As far as the consumption inequality is concerned, the marginal effect shows a relatively higher impact in urban areas probably due to the diversified nature of job and education opportunities, resulting in higher consumption inequality in these areas