Pointless benevolence

The commerce ministry has played quite the benevolent role towards our already spoiled bureaucrats in handing out monthly allowances between Rs50,000 and Rs120,000 for conducting market research to promote the country’s exports. The decision, rightfully so, has been met with consternation by the finance ministry with which we agree. It seems to serve as a major conflict of interest that Commerce Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan is also head of the Board of Export Development Fund (EDF). However, conflicts of interest are not something we pay much heed to in the country’s politics. The prudence of this move, whether committed because of the bureaucracy’s insistence or Mr Khan’s own, is highly questionable during a time when the exports market continues to shrink and the government has been unable to meet export targets for the fourth consecutive year.

Although the move to conduct research is intelligible to bolster the exports market, the doling out of cash to those already in the department is ludicrous. Most officials are not trained in scientifically conducting research. Essentially, this makes a mockery of the entire process that economists spend years and decades to master. Instead, the commerce ministry would better serve the nation by hiring students or graduates concentrating on economics to conduct market studies and paying them stipends or salaries to complete the work. Unless the best people are recruited to do the job, the commerce ministry is only underscoring that it has no actual will to improve the exports market for the benefit of the country and simply wants to pay more money to its bureaucrats. Research says that countries rich in natural resources develop more slowly than countries that import many of their resources, and miss out on export-led growth despite all they have to offer in the way of exports. With the shoddy state of the exports market, it is crucial that accurate research is conducted so as to overturn this curse.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2017.

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