a mere 8 percent into servicing foreign debt.
The second-largest item in the budget is the Public Sector Development Plan (PSD) – and around 70 percent of the PSDP is spent on politically determined brick and mortar projects (both at the federal as well as the provincial level). An estimated 20 percent is spent on the purchase of vehicles and no more than 6 percent is spent on human capital. PSDP has at times been called ‘a slush fund for politicians’.
I have been told that accounting is the “practice and body of knowledge concerned primarily with methods for recording transactions, keeping financial records and performing internal audits.”
Sakib Sherani recently wrote: “A national budget should be the embodiment of an overall economic vision of a government. Rather than being a mere collection of numbers worked out on the basis of taking the previous year’s allocations and applying an ad hoc increase....the underlying fiscal and tax policy that underpins a budget should be designed to achieve a higher end.”
Should a budget be designed to achieve a higher end? Yes, I think so. And what should that higher end be? For the record, we need to create at least 36 million new jobs in the following 10 years – and there could be no higher end than to provide employment to all the entrants of the labour force. And Budget 2015-16 has almost nothing in it towards the achievement of that higher end.
The average life expectancy of our budgets is around three months (before the revisions start kicking in). The power sector is out of the control of the federal government (as of the last day of February, the circular debt stood at a colossal Rs606 billion). I am convinced that the energy sector is going to shake the foundations of the budget in the next few months.
It is a quantitative budget – not qualitative. It is numerical – not imaginative. It is math – not wisdom. It has been a mathematical, arithmetical and algebraic exercise. It is not a thinking budget. It should have been a pensive, contemplative budget – a budget with the future in mind and a budget to achieve a ‘higher end’.
The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad.
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