Gallup Pakistan

For three years, cigarettes in Pakistan kept getting more affordable, tax rates hadn't moved since 2019, while incomes and prices drifted upward around them. That changed in February 2023, when the government raised excise duty by over 150% in a single move, the largest one-time hike on record. Affordability reversed overnight: buying 2,000 cigarettes went from costing 3% of per capita income to 6.2%, more than doubling in a matter of months. The behavioral response tracks the theory closely. SPDC's own research on an earlier price increase found that 29% of smokers cut back and 12.8% quit or seriously considered quitting once cigarettes got more expensive, and the national numbers bear that pattern out: cigarette smoking fell from 12.4% of adults in 2014 to 9.8% in 2024, driven mostly by men, whose smoking rate dropped from 22.2% to 15.8%. Price, not persuasion, appears to be doing the heaviest lifting in Pakistan's tobacco control story, which is exactly why sustaining the tax rate matters more than any single hike. @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani

Pakistan has nearly doubled its annual PhD output since 2018, pushing total production past 40,000 graduates, even as the labour market gives almost nothing back for it. A worker with 16+ years of schooling earns just 1.86 times what an uneducated worker makes, less than half of India's 4.18x return on the same comparison. Pakistan's wage curve trails India's by almost a full education stage at every point, meaning the incentive to finish school, let alone pursue a doctorate, is weak to begin with. The credential pipeline is expanding fastest at the exact moment the market is signalling that credentials barely matter, a mismatch that points to an absorption problem. @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani

As Pakistan marks 79 years of independence, Gallup data shows a country whose national pride runs deeper than the usual flag-waving optics: 88% of Pakistanis say they feel proud to call themselves Pakistani, and that sentiment isn't just talk as 86% say they'd fight for the country if needed, placing Pakistan 4th globally on that measure, ahead of Italy, Austria, Germany, and Spain. Are you in the 73% who feel very proud, or somewhere further down the list? @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani #pakistan #august14 #independenceday #Azadi

Gallup Pakistan's Big Data Analytics team analysed DHS data across Pakistan🇵🇰, India🇮🇳, and Bangladesh🇧🇩 and found that education lowers fertility by a strikingly similar proportion in all three countries, but that consistency exposes rather than resolves the puzzle. Within Pakistan, the pattern is unmistakable: women with no education average 4.2 births compared to 2.6 among the most educated, a gradient that holds nationwide (PDHS 2017–18). Yet placed alongside India and Bangladesh, Pakistan's most-educated women still average 3.37 completed births, even higher than India's least-educated women will eventually have, and nearly double India's most-educated tier. If education worked the same way but from the same starting point, Pakistan's curve should sit roughly where India's does, which means education is doing its job; the proportional effect is real and consistent, but something else is holding Pakistan's entire fertility curve higher at every education level, and identifying what that is may matter more for policy than the education gradient itself. @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani #pakistan #india #bangladesh #birthrate #EmpoweringPakistanWithData

Gallup Big Data Analysis for the ASER Pakistan 2025 data shows that grade promotion in Pakistan’s school system is near-universal, while mastery of foundational reading and numeracy skills lags significantly behind. Nearly all enrolled children advance a grade each year, yet by Class 3, only 12.4% can read a Class 2-level story and just 9.1% can perform two-digit division; foundational competency does not approach majority levels until Class 5, where 52.3% can read a story and 49.6% can do division. This pattern indicates that the education system is structured around consistent grade advancement rather than verified skill acquisition, resulting in a widening gap between the grade a child is enrolled in and the skills that grade is meant to certify. The implication is that enrollment and promotion figures, on their own, are insufficient indicators of educational progress, and that foundational learning assessments at early grade levels may be necessary to identify and address skill gaps before they compound. @GallupPak × @MacroPakistani #EmpoweringPakistanWithData #news #economy #economicdata #Pakistan

Household well-being in Pakistan is shaped by both where people live and how they allocate their household budgets. Welfare outcomes vary considerably across cities, pointing to differences in access to economic opportunities and living conditions. At the same time, a growing share of household consumption is spent on utilities, leaving less room for other essential and discretionary expenses. Together, these trends show how geographic disparities and changing spending patterns are actively influencing the financial wellbeing of Pakistani households. @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani #EmpoweringPakistanWithData #news #economy #economicdata #pakistan

Pakistan’s 🇵🇰 migration story is shifting from a pure labour-export model to a broader skills-export economy. In 2025, 762,499 Pakistanis registered for overseas employment, with nearly 70% going to Saudi Arabia alone, while remittances reached $38.3 billion in FY25. The older pipeline of labourers, drivers and trade workers still dominates in absolute numbers, but professional emigration is rising much faster: between 2010 and 2024, professional outflow increased 6.5x, while manual and trade categories remained below their 2015 peak. This matters because Pakistan is not only losing workers; it is increasingly relying on their exit as an external-sector strategy, with the government’s Saudi-linked deployment plan targeting 1.51 million workers a year by 2039. @GallupPak × @MacroPakistani #EmpoweringPakistanWithData #Pakistan #news #economy #economicdata

Pakistan’s 🇵🇰 2025 visa data show a clear mobility penalty: Pakistani applicants were not the largest applicant group, but they were among the most heavily rejected. The UK refused 72 thousand Pakistani short-term visa applications, the 2nd-highest number of rejections among listed nationalities, costing applicants £9.17 million in non-refundable fees. Schengen countries rejected another 40,199 applications, with a rejection rate of 46%. Together, the UK and Schengen rejected 112,387 Pakistani applications, meaning nearly 1 in 2 applications failed, costing applicants around €14.35 million, or roughly Rs 4.56 billion. This is a direct household cost attached to Pakistan’s weak passport, income scrutiny, documentation barriers, and global trust deficit. @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani Data visualization by Brand Nib #EmpoweringPakistanWithData #news #Pakistan #UK #Schengen