A silly economic team

The silliness of the economic team knows no bounds. Or is there a method to their madness?

The headline on the business pages of this paper on September 15 — “Politicisation starts taking toll on national issues” — reminds me of the very first column I wrote for these pages. It was a lament on the PPP’s now proverbial economic poverty. The main point was that PPP governments have always had trouble with the economy and the economists. Never bothered to have some of its own cadres trained in what Thomas Carlyle called a dismal science, it has to rely on technocrats borrowed from the IFIs (international financial institutions) and their local satellites. These economists think they are apolitical and the political leadership is perceived to be ‘a-economic’. The result is frequent miscommunication and a mutual lack of appreciation of the political economy of governance.

The government can live without a finance minister for months together. Once appointed, it can grant him leave for private business at a time of a grave national crisis. The appointment of the State Bank governor can also wait beyond the legal limit. It lived without a chief economist at the Planning Commission for more than two years. Now it has imported someone whose disconnect with this stop-go economy is matched only by the disbelief his boss, the deputy chairman, has in planning. Massive floods hit the country in last week of July. You name it and the Planning Commission has a section on it— water, health, housing, public investment, macroeconomics. And yet — till date — there is no assessment of the damage by this army of professionals and a strategy to deal with it. With such incompetence, the chairman of the Planning Commission, the prime minister, cannot be blamed for the $43 billion blunder of confusing the cost of war on terror with the damage caused by floods. Even this assessment was made by the ministry of finance, not the Planning Commission, and owned up by the babus of the ministry of foreign affairs.

In the instant case, the economic adviser of the ministry of finance has been blamed for misleading the prime minister about the prospects of growth, fiscal deficit and inflation. This is not the job of the economic adviser in the first place. Traditionally, economic advisers have been professionals concerned mainly with producing an authentic assessment of the past in the pre-budget document, the ‘Pakistan Economic Survey’. Future and medium term assessments are the business of the Planning Commission. One past economic adviser, appointed without merit, had been pushed into this role when the then chief economist of the Planning Commission declined to manufacture truth for Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz. It is unfortunate that the incumbent should assume this mantle of witch doctor.

It is an insult to people’s intelligence to suggest that an ill-prepared set of figures quoted by a quasi-executive of the country was a stab in the back of the ‘barat’ that was negotiating with the IMF in Washington. There are decent ways of pressurising the government to kick up the current head of the economic team to the status of deputy prime minister in charge of the economy. The silliness of the team knows no bounds. Or there is a method to their madness? The grapevine describes the team as the Trojan horse of the non-corrupt set-up being debated ad nauseam and ad infinitum by the usual suspects. They have all served the previous non-corrupt set-up, you know.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 17^th, 2010.