In the late 1980s Pakistan embarked a programme of structural reforms to manage fiscal balances and external accounts in order to place the economy on the path of high and sustained growth. The impact of such a programme on the distribution of income and incidence of poverty has featured prominently in the development debate. It arose out of the concern that these programmes in the developing countries had often initially led to a worsening of the distribution of income and an increase in the incidence of poverty. With the financial assistance from the International Development Research Centre, Canada, the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) designed a research project entitled Micro Impacts of Macroeconomic Adjustment Policies (MIMAP) to improve the design of policies, which combine growth objectives with an improvement in income distribution, alleviation of poverty and an improvement in the welfare of vulnerable groups in Pakistan. This project focuses on determining the impact of structural adjustment policies on the poor and vulnerable groups of the society. The study also examines the impact of these policies on the extent of participation of different groups in different types of labour market. These objectives of the MIMAP project have been achieved by three ways: carrying out a household survey in rural and urban areas, using the existing secondary socio-economic data sources to produce some case studies, and developing a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. This brief paper is quite focused. It describes the methodology and scope of the household survey carried out by the PIDE between March and July 1999, with an aim to generate nationally representative data to examine the incidence of poverty and distribution of income. It also includes information on household composition, schooling, labour market, sources of income, credit, fertility, child mortality, health, and nutrition.