Government achieves only four out of 89 targets

Abandons path of economic reforms and adopts populous measures

ISLAMABAD: In its first three years, the PML-N government could achieve only four out of 89 targets that it set in the election manifesto, as it has abandoned economic reforms and adopted measures that are more populist, reveals a report of an independent think tank.

In its report “Bad Economics is Bad Politics’, the Policy Research Institute of Market Economy (PRIME) stated that the ruling party has “obsessed itself with the cliché of developing infrastructure” by moving away from the sustainable economic reforms path.



The report said the government’s economic policies were geared towards achieving goals that in its view would fetch votes in the next elections. It has dubbed the new fiscal year 2016-17 budget as an ‘election year budget’.

Although the PRIME scorecard showed poor economic performance of the government, yet critics like Ali Kemal - an economist working with the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics - said PRIME “overestimated the government’s performance and was generous” in giving scores.

The PRIME report tracked down the 89 targets set by the PML-N to achieve economic revival and energy security. It was the seventh report on the PML-N election manifesto that covered the period January-June 2016.

The report argues that the government has chosen not to follow promised reforms of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation, and adopted popular economic measures underpinned by what it calls “development politics” and other populist economic measures.

Non-beneficial infrastructure projects

The report argued that most of the projects that the government was undertaking were neither beneficial in the long term nor would benefit majority of the country’s population. It concludes, “there are only very few infrastructure projects of the PML-N that can be declared beneficial for majority of the population and would give benefit in the long term.”

“The development politics of the PML-N is purely politically-driven and the local logic and infrastructural context does not justify rationale of most of the projects, big or small,” it said.

Ali Salman, Executive Director of PRIME, said after full three years, the PML-N’s cumulative progress card had only four targets that were achieved - one of them was for economic revival and the remaining three for energy security.

The indicators that showed progress were 28 for economic revival and eight for energy security.

There were 12 indicators, which saw no development at all. In addition, there were 23 indicators, for which the previous status had been maintained with no development either positive or negative.

Four of the indicators showed no progress, rather underwent reversal, and thus earned a score of zero. Ten indicators got a negative score.

Privatisation

According to the report, the government has stalled the privatisation programme in the energy sector. One of the immensely important pillars of the envisaged reforms was privatisation, which has been stalled last fiscal year.



Three mammoth taxpayers’ money guzzlers, Pakistan Steel Mills, Pakistan International Airlines and Pakistan Railways were no more and nowhere on the list of SOEs to be privatised within the assigned timeframe, it added.

At the launch of the report, Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal insisted that the privatisation of energy sector would stall investment in power distribution companies in the transit period, endangering the government’s plan to add 10,000 megawatts of electricity by 2018.

Interestingly, the government realised this by spending Rs1.7 billion on hiring financial advisers for the privatisation of power sector companies and spending billions of rupees on pro-privatisation campaigns.

In the energy sector, whatever reforms had been introduced during the last three years, the process had been slow and was not conducive to bring any tangible results in the remaining period of the PML-N, it added.

The government could not eliminate the circular debt and there was no creation of the Ministry of Energy as the Prime Minister promised in his election manifesto.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 22^nd, 2016.

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