Firefighter in chief

At a PSX event on Friday, Finance Minister Miftah Ismail informed a group of affluent stockbrokers, bankers, and investors that Pakistan was now moving on the right path. However, so far, all of the policies and choices made by the ruling coalition have amounted to putting out fires to save the IMF programme. The government has not actively addressed the fundamental structural inefficiencies in the economy.

We won’t be out of the woods until we decide to address imbalances like the deficient levels of both industrial and agricultural economic output, the unaffordable tax-to-GDP ratio of just over nine per cent, the lack of adequate economic documentation, wasteful public sector spending, ineffective SOEs and the exclusion of the vast majority of people from the financial system.

Muhammad Usama Shoaib

Rahim Yar Khan