By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Just months after a surprising surge of optimism swept Pakistani public opinion, that confidence has largely dissolved.
A new survey by the global polling and market research firm Ipsos found that only two in ten Pakistanis now believe their country is headed in the right direction — a sharp retreat from a 40 percent peak recorded earlier this year — as anxieties over inflation, unemployment, and household finances reassert themselves across nearly every demographic group.
The findings, released on Wednesday, land just days before Pakistan’s federal government is expected to present its budget for the coming fiscal year, a moment the government has cast as a milestone in its effort to stabilize an economy battered by years of currency crises and cost-of-living pressures. The survey suggests those claims have yet to resonate broadly with the public.
“Confidence in the country’s direction falls to 22 percent, following a 40 percent peak earlier this year amid US-Iran tensions, indicating a rapid reversal of recent gains and returning to levels broadly comparable to the COVID-19 period,” Ipsos said in its report.
The pullback in sentiment is striking not only for its speed but for its breadth. Across indicators tracking personal financial outlook, job security, investment confidence, and comfort with household spending, the numbers have moved in the same direction — downward — with geopolitical turbulence, specifically tensions between the United States and Iran, cited as a key accelerant.
Personal financial optimism dropped nine percentage points to 31 percent. Confidence in job security, which had nearly doubled over the past two years in what analysts had viewed as a tentative sign of stabilization, fell to 17 percent in the second quarter of 2026. Comfort with making major purchases — a closely watched proxy for consumer health — sits at just 5 percent. The share of respondents who said they felt comfortable making everyday household purchases was 7 percent, down five points from the previous quarter and, like several other measures, now broadly comparable to readings recorded during the depths of the pandemic.
Confidence in investment, which Ipsos noted had shown some stabilization in recent quarters, remained low at 14 percent.
Only one in five respondents believed the economy would strengthen in the months ahead — a nine-point decline from the prior survey — while a similar proportion described the economy as currently strong.
The survey was conducted last month and included interviews with more than 1,000 people drawn from all four of Pakistan’s provinces — Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan — as well as Islamabad, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Ipsos found consistent pockets of relative optimism scattered across demographic and geographic lines, even as the overall trend ran in the other direction. Men expressed more optimism than women. Young people were more optimistic than older respondents. Rural residents were more upbeat than those in urban centers.
Provincially, respondents in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan registered higher confidence across several indicators than those in Punjab and, to a lesser extent, Sindh — a pattern that held across measures of economic outlook, job security, and investment confidence. Respondents identifying as lower-middle-income showed more optimism than other income groups on certain questions, while upper-income and upper-middle-class respondents expressed relatively greater comfort with purchases and investment.
Still, those variances amount to gradations of concern rather than grounds for confidence. The survey’s most striking finding may be how thoroughly the brief optimism of early 2026 — itself something of an anomaly in a country that has cycled through economic crises with dispiriting regularity — was unwound.
Ipsos tracks public sentiment and consumer confidence in Pakistan on a quarterly basis, offering a longitudinal record of how global and domestic shocks register in everyday economic perception. The firm attributed the latest decline in part to continued sensitivity to geopolitical developments, noting that the escalation of US-Iran tensions earlier this year appeared to have disrupted what had been a fragile but notable recovery in public confidence.
The reversal comes at a politically consequential moment. Pakistan’s government has pointed to easing inflation and progress on debt restructuring as evidence that its economic program is working. Whether the budget expected in the coming days will address the specific anxieties — unemployment, cost pressures, purchasing power — that dominated the survey’s findings remains to be seen. For now, the data suggest that whatever stabilization has occurred in macroeconomic indicators has not translated into a sense of security for most Pakistanis.
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