Publication Date
12-5-2017
Description
To propose the way forward for Pakistan it is essential to understand the past historical pattern and outcomes and the factors that contributed to those outcomes. The goal that Pakistan has set itself for the future is to become 20th largest economy in the world by 2025. What are the influences that can facilitate or constrain the achievement of the proposed goal? Pakistan’s economic history has gone through periods of booms and busts . But broadly speaking, the seventy years of Pakistan’s economy can be divided into two distinct periods. The first forty years 1950-90 during which Pakistan was one of the top ten economic performers among the developing countries in the world and the next twenty five years 1990-2015 when the country has fallen behind its neighboring countries and has had a decline in the average annual growth rate from 6.5 percent to 4.5 percent2 . The reversal of this declining trend and resumption of the past growth trajectory are therefore the main challenges that have to be addressed in the next eight years. This paper attempts to examine several alternative hypotheses that can explain this slow down, volatile and inequitable growth of the last twenty five years and through a process of elimination advances theoretical and empirical evidence to show that the most powerful explanatory hypothesis lies in the decay of institutions of governance.. The same institutions , on the other hand, were strong and performed quite well during the first four decades despite a myriad of difficulties and external and internal shocks. The main argument of this paper is that the intermediation process through which good economic policies are translated into a rise in incomes and equitable distribution of benefits involves these institutions of governance. It is the quality, robustness and responsiveness of these institutions that can transmit social and economic policies.
Recommended Citation
Husain, I. (2017). Development Beyond Seventy: The Way Forward 1. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/faculty-research-talks-speeches/16
Notes
Key note address delivered at the 12th Sustainable Development Conference organized by SDPI at Islamabad on December 5, 2017 2 IMF. (2016). Pakistan Selected Issues Paper. IMF Country Report No.16/2.