PM constitutes Economic Advisory Council

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has constituted a 18-member Economic Advisory Council (EAC) to ensure that the best possible professional advice is available to the government to inform, optimise and synergise the formulation and implementation of its economic and financial policies.

However, all such EACs constituted in last one decade had failed to deliver any good and most of the time it were used as tool to get patronage for doing personal work of members of the EAC.

According to an official notification, the secretary of Finance Division will be secretary EAC and 11 members included into EAC are renowned economists, researchers, academicians and others. Some of them belonged to foreign reputed institutes of the world, mainly from US and UK.

Imran Khan has included mostly renowned professionals into the fold of the EAC like Dr Farrukh Iqbal, Dean and Director Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Dr Ashfaque Hassan Khan, Principal and Dean School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NUST), Dr Ijaz Nabi, Professor of Economics Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri, Executive Director Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Dr Asad Zaman, Vice Chancellor of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Dr Nawid Hamid, Professor of Economics at Lahore School of Economics (LSE), Syed Salim Raza, former Governor SBP, Atif Mian, Princeton University (Department of Economics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy), Dr Asim Ijaz Khawaja, Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School, and Dr Imran Rasul, Professor of Economics Department of Economics University College London.

There will be seven official members of the EAC, including minister for finance, revenues and economic affairs, minister for planning, development and reforms, deputy chairman Planning Commission, governor State Bank of Pakistan, adviser on institutional reforms, adviser on commerce and secretary finance.

The EAC shall meet at least once a month and its mandate will be to advise the government on both short-term macroeconomic stabilisation interventions and long-term structural reforms for stable and sustained economic development.

The EAC is expected to play a pivotal role in strengthening the capacity of the government to design and introduce sound and effective policies for rapid and continued social and economic advancement, human resource development, improvement of business processes and strengthening of data services.

The Council will also facilitate capacity building of the government in conducting policy analysis and will assist in reaching out to the international network of recognised economists to contribute to Pakistan’s development.

Ministry of Finance will be the nodal government agency for the EAC, which will function in an entirely non-partisan manner and is expected to strengthen existing state institutions in a collaborative and concerted manner.

The ultimate goal of the Council is to promote analytically sound and evidence-based reforms and initiatives for the progress and development of Pakistan.