Failure to thrive

When a child is showing signs of retarded development it is said to be ‘failing to thrive’ and Pakistan, a young state in real terms, has just received a report from the Institute of Policy Reforms (IPR) on Monday which is the clearest indicator yet that failure to thrive is now and will in the future inhibit national growth in every aspect of the economy and the daily lives of millions. This is not aery-faerie speculation but hard reality. The policies of this and previous governments do not support economic growth, stimulate investment or create better governance. Without economic growth there will be no new jobs and with the population set to hit 260 million by 2030 and around two million jobseekers created every year the future really is bleak.

The responsibility for this parlous state of affairs cannot be laid at the door of any single government as they all bear a collective guilt, but unless the incumbent government, having had the writing on the wall lit in neon lights for it, fails to act then responsibility for stopping the rot lies with them. Key to any reversal of fortune is reform, and reform is not a trait that the government of the PML-N is either adept at or willing to even consider — the failure to reform the judicial process under the National Action Plan (NAP) being a case in point.

The prescription laid out in the IPR report is clear enough. Raise revenue. Taxation is the obvious area of necessary reform and it is not happening. Spend more on up-skilling workers for the knowledge economy. Spend at least 8 per cent of GDP on health and education. Anti-corruption mechanisms have to become a part of the development agenda. There is a substantial infrastructure deficit and low private investment in the sector, with low levels of confidence in large part attributable to concerns about the security environment.

The list goes on and is in many ways not new news to any seasoned observer of the state of the nation, and reports such as this appear with numbing regularity all saying versions of the same thing — reform, and do it now. It will be painful, difficult and unpopular in some quarters. But the clock is running backwards now and failure to thrive never has a good outcome.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 29^th, 2017.

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