Comment: Action over rhetoric

LAHORE: Our economic management suffers from a chronic addiction to grand announcements and ribbon-cutting ceremonies rather than results. Instead of nurturing existing assets and optimising infrastructure, they have kept feeding the illusion of ‘development’ through new ground-breaking ceremonies.

This obsession has locked up scarce public money in unfinished schemes, bleeding the exchequer while the economy gasps for liquidity. The present regime at the start of its tenure promised to focus on completing ongoing projects, improving efficiency and rebalancing priorities. The idea sounded promising: stop adding more half-finished projects when trillions are already stuck in incomplete ones. Yet, as another fiscal year unfolds, little has visibly changed. The same mistakes continue. Projects remain frozen midway, debts pile up, and every passing day inflates the cost of inaction.

To the finance minister’s credit, last year’s budget did attempt a shift — allocating more funds to ongoing projects instead of launching new ones. But the follow-through has been painfully slow. Implementation bottlenecks, bureaucratic turf wars and weak monitoring have eroded the impact. Unless this approach is institutionalised through binding fiscal discipline and project evaluation audits, it will remain another half-hearted experiment.

In our enthusiasm to industrialise, we tried to do everything at once — promoting sectors we couldn’t manage while ignoring others that could have triggered stronger, broader growth. We copied policy models from abroad without understanding the governance and transparency that made them succeed elsewhere. The result is an economy built on mimicry rather than merit.

The roots of unemployment lie not merely in the absence of jobs but in a misreading of Pakistan’s labour transition. Our policies and training programmes failed to recognise this transition. Skills taught in public institutions often have no market demand. Billions are spent producing graduates the economy cannot absorb, while genuine technical skills go underdeveloped.

Pakistan’s economy does not suffer from lack of ideas — it suffers from lack of execution. Every year lost to indecision adds to our debt burden and erodes public trust. What the country needs is not another vision statement but the courage to finish what has already begun, reform what has failed and govern with integrity.

A deeper failure lies in governance. We never prioritised institutional capacity, human capital or efficiency. Our domestic commerce — the lifeblood of internal economic activity — remains shackled by outdated regulations, rent-seeking intermediaries and an indifferent bureaucracy. This explains why Pakistan’s growth is cyclical: a few years of fast growth, followed by a crash. Such lopsided booms destroy industries that never recover during downturns, eroding employment and investor confidence.

A sustainable growth model must integrate infrastructure, education, skill development and labour reforms. A road, a power plant, or an industrial estate means little if it does not create sustainable jobs or stimulate private enterprise. International evidence is unequivocal: countries that invest in education and health build a more productive workforce, which in turn drives long-term growth. Every additional year of schooling and every improvement in public health raises incomes and productivity across generations. Pakistan continues to ignore this basic equation.

We are masters in making lame excuses for our failures. We blamed energy shortages for our industrial stagnation. Yet history tells another story. Between 1997 and 2007, Pakistan had power and gas surpluses, low inflation and stable interest rates — but industrial growth remained sluggish. The real problem wasn’t energy; it was the lack of efficiency, innovation, and management discipline. We still persist with rent-seeking and protectionism — rewarding connections over competence.

A thriving internal market — supported by fair taxation, logistics reforms and rural development — can generate millions of jobs and provide the base for export competitiveness. Yet, domestic commerce continues to be stifled by arbitrary regulations, corruption, and lack of credit access.

It is time to break with this outdated mindset. Growth must no longer depend on selective incentives for a few favoured sectors. Instead, a thematic approach is needed — one that promotes innovation, entrepreneurship, and fair opportunity across all sectors. The government’s stated intent to provide equal facilitation must now move from policy documents to visible, measurable action.