Publication Date

3-6-2024

Description

It's always a great pleasure to be addressing the SAARC audiences because I've been doing that for so many years in the past. .Let me begin by congratulating the State Bank of Pakistan for organizing this particular discussion because we're moving in a completely different direction and we have to prepare ourselves and learn from the other countries and other best practices in order to adopt and use Big data, Data analytics , the AI, machine learning tools in order to improve our economies. So I'm quite happy that this topic has been taken up today but let me submit that this should just be the beginning of a long journey starting with this awareness seminar. Big data is a tool and that tool is to be used for spurring improvement in the production, processes, methods which , in turn, would uplift the living standards of the people in our countries provided the countries follow the right set of policies. So my emphasis today is to sketch out the requisite economic policies which can potentially maximize the benefits by using these technologies. . I have a book which I just published along with three young Ph D scholars which is a work of two years : Development Pathways India, Pakistan and Bangladesh 1947- 2022 . This is the first empirically based, data driven exercise which tries to identify what are the common success factors behind the development journeys of these three countries and what are the pain points and the risks for the future development. And I thought you are all going to be involved in policy making so this distillation of lessons and enunciations of possible risks is something which you should keep at the back of your mind when you are involved in policy making. The first and foremost learning is that the form of the government –democratic, autocratic, authoritarian, military, hybrid – that doesn't matter. What matters is the continuity, consistency and predictability of economic policies. So we have situations where the countries have had only two or three democratically elected prime ministers and despite the fact that they belonged to different political parties, they carried out the same economic policies and the results were very positive. And then there were some authoritarian governments in the same country who failed to do anything useful. There are examples of other authoritarian or military regimes which were able to bring about reforms successfully . So the form of the government is not so important. What the investors are looking is stability, ----- policies that are not altered with every change in the political regimes. They feel quite comfortable that the decisions they are taking today with their money will bear fruits five years later or six years later , without any surprises, because the underlying policy regime hasn't changed.

Notes

Keynote address delivered at SAARC Finance Seminar held at Islamabad on March 6, 2024

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