What do Pakistanis consider the country's biggest problems?

KARACHI: Most Pakistanis consider unemployment and inflation to be the biggest problems faced by the country, followed by corruption, the results of a recent nationwide opinion poll have revealed.

The nationwide Jang Geo News Poll was conducted last month in collaboration with Gallup Pakistan and Pulse Consultant.

When asked which issue they thought was the biggest problem faced by Pakistan, at least one in five respondents chose unemployment (22%) and inflation (21%).

At the same time, 14% of the respondents interviewed by Gallup Pakistan thought corruption was Pakistan's most pressing concern, followed by energy crisis (8%), poverty (8%), and domestic terrorism (7%).

Interestingly, only 3% believed lack of education to be a critical issue.

A similar sentiment was echoed in the results of the Pulse Consultants survey, with unemployment (59%) and inflation (58%) ranking at the top of the list, followed by power shortage (31%), poverty (26%), corruption (24%), terrorism (15%), and lack of education (12%).

Although the results showed that Pakistanis are aware of country's major problems, a large majority also said they think Pakistan is headed in the right direction.

65% of the respondents interviewed in the Gallup survey and 58% interviewed in the Pulse survey believed Pakistan is headed in the right direction.

However, 32% of the respondents in the Gallup Pakistan survey and 35% in the Pulse survey were not that positive when asked about the direction in which the country was headed.

Note from Editor/Disclaimer: The Jang-Geo-News poll is carried out regularly on a national level according to internationally recognised principles of scientific polling. Large media houses across the world carry out these surveys to assess the perception and opinions of the public.

In order to make it more balanced and transparent, the Jang-Geo-News poll was carried out in collaboration with two different research agencies—Gallup Pakistan, one of the renowned survey companies in Pakistan, and Pulse Consultant, one of the fastest growing research agencies in the country.

The results represent public opinion computed on the basis of views expressed by anonymous respondents selected randomly and interviewed face-to-face. Such surveys contain a margin of error, and should not be taken as a basis for casting votes.

The combined sample size of the study was more than 6,000 households. Gallup Pakistan carried out the survey from October 10 to November 1 using an error margin of +-2 to 3% at 95% confidence level, while the parallel research by Pulse Consultant was conducted from Oct 8 to Oct 25 with a margin of error of 1.62% at 95% confidence level.