Pakistan’s Commitment to Sustainable Development—Mapping Annual Expenditure with Selected Priority SDG Targets

In this chapter we examine Pakistan’s commitment to SDGs through its annual development expenditure policy. We link the allocation policy to the SDG targets, examining if SDGs demonstrating a higher gap in the reported targets and baseline figures attract more development funds through the national allocation policy. The review of the literature shows that there is a lack of studies mapping the national development expenditure with the progress reported by nations for SDGs due to the subjectivity arising from synergies and trade-offs between different SDGs (Fonseca et al. in Sustainability 12:3359, 2020; Hege et al. in Public Sector Econ 43:423–444, 2019; Masuda et al. in Sustain Sci 16:1539–1562, 2021). Nonetheless, it is important to link the development expenditure with the reported sustainable progress to determine the commitment level of nations. Therefore, in this chapter we attempt to address this gap by developing a methodology to map development expenditure to SDGs' targets, and examine if Pakistan's allocation policy aligns with the gaps reported in the SDGs' progress. For this purpose, we: (1) compile secondary data on SDGs and annual allocation, (2) compute the gap for high-priority targets of Pakistan, (3) assign related targets into groups, and (4) link the development expenditure to these groups. T-test (unpaired) is used to assess if the allocation trend is different for the targets showing a high gap before and after reporting the baseline values. The analysis results show evidence of partial alignment of the national allocation policy for development expenditure with SDG targets. As such, the findings depict that a developing market like Pakistan has to consider many factors in the allocation process, and though SDGs play a significant role in the allocation policy, unfortunately, these factors are not the only concerns of such markets. The findings of this study have two main implications. Theoretically, this study contributes to the existing literature by developing a process to map budgetary allocations to SDGs based on groups of targets, instead of looking at allocations from the perspective of individual targets. Secondly, the study highlights avenues to explore to achieve SDGs more effectively, and standardize the reporting and monitoring process of sustainable development, globally.