Is it normal for econ papers to use the first person? Super weird to read. His Latex formatting is a mess too. Check out page 37 for a scatter plot of rock solid correlation, lol. Not going to read the full 56 page mess because that's a job for an unpaid reviewer, not an unpaid commentator.
That being said, there's a shit ton of easy hidden variables here. Mountains of them. People are going to talk about spurious correlations, which is fine, but there' s a more subtle trick here, the hidden variable.
Sunscreen use is correlated with an increase in shark attacks and increase in hot dog sales. Are sharks attracted to sunscreen? Is there a secret ingredient in hot suncreen that makes people eat hot dogs? I can come up with pretty good explanations, that pass a qucik sniff test, all day long.
The answer is of course not. More people are simply at the beach. More people --> more collisions with sharks, more hot dogs shoved down gullets.
Not familiar enough with the culture of Pakistan to point out the specific variables, but that's the guess.