PIDE launches debate on reforms

Islamabad:The Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) has launched a nationwide debate on the reform of key sectors, domains, and institutions.

Around 15 unique areas have been covered in the magazine ‘Discourse including Reconfiguring Pakistan: State, Society, and Economy,’' including Reconceptualising Development, Constitutional Reform, Political Contestation, Parliament and Civil Service, Economic Policy, Foreign Aid, Energy, Trade and Industry, Land and Agriculture, Labour Relations, Education, Public Welfare, Cities and Local Governance, Climate, and Society and Culture, as stated in a PIDE news release on Sunday.

The publication features contributions from several prominent personalities in the academic domain, political sphere, legal fraternity, media sector, government bureaucracy, diplomatic circle, business community, development network, and more.

Their insights aim to provide a framework within which a productive policy agenda could be formulated. According to the press release issued by PIDE, the publication features a substantial number of high-profile names from the academic domain, political sphere, legal fraternity, media sector, government bureaucracy, diplomatic circle, business community, development network, and more, to offer a framework within which a productive policy agenda may be formulated.

According to PIDE, each political party that aspires to be sworn into power must address each of the publication’s sections, which have rarely – if ever – been discussed at a structural level. Colonial-era governance arrangements based on extraction have unfortunately continued to persist, with the White man simply being replaced by the ‘Brown sahib’. Without the elimination of these oppressive modalities, Pakistan will most likely continue to sink into further indebtedness, economic precocity, and socio-political instability: glimpses of which have been observed across the country in recent months.

He further went on to claim that whilst incompetent individuals in the corridors of power are a primary reason for all this, an equally important point of consideration is the political economy that is responsible for their entry and overdue stay. Technical innovations into electoral processes are naturally going to be part of this, but a broader bird’s eye view is pertinent to identify the various mechanisms – sometimes referred to as ‘feeders’ – that form the system of political contestation. These include unions, associations, empowered local governments, freedom of speech/assembly, unimpeded arts/culture, respect for human rights, and an overall dynamic, robust civil society that can check entrenched power structures.

It is largely acknowledged in academic circles that prosperity is ultimately downstream of good governance, but what this means in our specific context remains ambiguous. Policy formulation in Pakistan is predominantly outsourced to international financial institutions and multilateral donor agencies, which are known to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to their proposals – reproducing them in a wide array of countries across the Global South with little to no attention paid to the situation on the ground. The reason for this, of course, is that governing elites have approached their roles with the objective of rent-seeking: extracting resources from the global economy (mostly in the form of credit agreements) that are ultimately paid for by the already vulnerable working class population via indirect taxation on goods and services.

These concerns bleed into all others - resulting in the situation today, in which Pakistan finds itself on the brink of sovereign default and at the mercy of the predatory International Monetary Fund. The complete discourse is available online at https://file.pide.org.pk­/pdfpideresearch/discourse-2023-06.pdf.