ABSTRACT

Primarily, the underlying dissertation keeps focus on three research essays on first three SDGs in Pakistan such as no poverty, zero hunger, and good health & wellbeing in Pakistan. First research essay aims at exploring the impacts of urbanization, and climate change on food insecurity in Pakistan. Second research essay investigates the influences of urbanization, and climate change on households’ health outcomes, while third research essay maintains focus on exploring the effects of urbanization and climate change on multidimensional poverty in Pakistan. In all three essays, we have employed the latest round of the PSLM (2019-20), which is national and district representative. Moreover, this survey covers the dimensions and indicators of the SDGs as well. For empirical purpose, we have employed binary Logit, Ordered Logit, and instrumental variable approaches to estimate the aforementioned research objectives of the study.

The findings of first essay demonstrates that urbanization shows negative impacts on food insecurity. The negative sign explains the reduction in food insecurity, but coefficient was too little to carry any economic significance. Then, we use average rainfall and transportation facility as instrument of the urbanization. The findings of instrumental variable approach demonstrates that the impacts of urbanization becomes adverse and carries stronger impact. In addition, we introduced climatic shock as an explanatory variable; the findings highlight its negative impacts on household food insecurity, and it contains non-linear effects on food insecurity. The interactive term of both urbanization and climatic shocks are showing adverse impacts on food insecurity as we have found the case of instrumental variable approach. Likewise, findings from the second research essay also suggest the significant impacts of climatic variation and urbanization on household health demand. The health demand is measured by visit to doctor, types of hospital utilization, and what types of doctors he/she visited. Moreover, the findings from third essay indicates that climatic variables have adverse impacts on multidimensional poverty, but when it interacted with urbanization, we have found significant moderating impacts on multidimensional poverty in Pakistan. All these findings imply that Pakistan needs to design a comprehensive policy to tackle climatic vulnerability, and well-planed urbanization to achieve first three SDGs.