Article Type

Article

Description

A large number of professionals, academics and businessmen repeatedly ask a simple question: what is the real state of health of the Pakistani economy? Who is telling the truth? The finance ministry or ‘independent’ economists writing in newspapers and appearing on television? Should we believe reports from the IMF, World Bank and The Economist who give a relatively more optimistic picture of the economy? Or should we trust former governors, advisors and journalists telling us how weak and fragile the economy is? Is the government fudging data to make things look good? These are all legitimate questions as we are mired in a lot of confusion. In economics, there are several ways of measuring progress or outcomes. Each one of these metrics has limitations. One way is to use the year in which a political party assumed power as the benchmark and then compare macroeconomic indicators such as the GDP growth rate, inflation rate, current account deficit, foreign exchange reserves, budget deficit etc. in the current year.

Publication Source

Dawn

Publication Date

5-13-2015

Pages

1-3

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Economics Commons

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