These days, we hear a lot about Charter of Economy (CoE). There is a good number of ideas in the market. Think tanks and business community are leading the discourse. In the whole scenario, the most important stakeholders, the citizens, are missing. No one is asking them — what they need and what are their problems?
A bird eye view of the proposals circulating in the market shows everyone is trying to secure interests of his class. It seems an effort is being made to devise a charter of the elite for the elite.
The proposals also lack real context of country. People are talking about ideas without giving due importance to the ground realities. Right now, country is facing challenges of stagflation, depleting foreign reserves, higher food insecurity, current account deficit, compromised human capital and energy crisis. Stagflation is one of the most complicated problems which can shake the economic and social fabric of the country. Pakistan is caught in a dilemma – lack of choices. It is the result of wrong policy choices for gaining popularity by the successive governments. No government ever tried to correct the path of GDP growth. Unfortunately, Pakistan GDP is being led by consumption without enhancing production capacity.
The country is meeting demand by importing things which has strained our foreign reserves and negatively impacted production capacity. It gave birth to bubble and burst phenomena.
Second, dream-selling and poor planning is another distinctive characteristic of our economy. Economic planning is not based on data and facts. For example, Pakistan is an agriculture country, but successive governments ignored it. We were never able to develop any plan which can give push to our agriculture. The result is that we are importing foods worth more than $7.55 billion.
Third, we have systematically killed economic opportunities and our productive resources. Public enterprises like Steel Mill and PIA were destroyed. These are classic examples of bad governance and greed of our ruling elite. State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) were used as political bribe and were stuffed with cronies. Now, they want to sell them by making an excuse they are loss-making entities. There is one question. Why a businessman will buy a loss-making entity?
Fourth, corruption is so common that no one considers it bad. Pakistan bears loss of billions of dollars every year. It has bog downed the whole system and the economy. Political parties keep blaming each other, but do not take any decisive action to stop it. Rather, they join hands to protect each other when they face any challenge from outside.
Fifth, there are interests of political parties. They are not ready to comprise on their self-serving agenda. People are dying from floods and losing their life savings, but the political groups are busy in playing their games. Listening to their speeches, it seems they are dying for the people, but in reality, they are using them to get power.
In this context, Pakistan should concentrate on real problems to get tangible results. First, devise a long-term agenda and divide it into phases with concrete objectives. Each phase should be led by a sector by analysing its potential contribution. For example, in the beginning, Pakistan must focus on agriculture as it has potential to give immediate impetus to the economy. Simultaneously, SOEs should be prioritised for creating industrial momentum. Second, sustainability should be a key indicator of charter of economy.