Bottom of the class again

Pakistan tends to be towards the bottom of ‘ranking’ lists that get issued by a range of international organisations

Pakistan tends to be towards the bottom of most of the comparative and ‘ranking’ lists that get issued by a range of international organisations. That has been the case for decades and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. The latest is the annual report of the Global Prosperity Index, which shows that Pakistan has dropped three places from 2014 and is now ranked 130^th out of 142 countries. Legatum, the think tank that produces the index every year, uses eight categories to make its ranking — economy, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom and social capital. The last is something of an intangible and there are questions about objective verifiers for ‘social capital’.

A degree of caution needs to be exercised when it comes to the blind acceptance of this and all other ranking exercises. They are generally interpreted as headline statements and many will not look beyond whatever bad news is at the top of the page. In this instance, the news is not all bad and Pakistan’s performance has improved in four out of the eight indices. Perhaps surprisingly, governance, safety and security and personal freedoms all showed signs of improvement in 2015, a trend which will hopefully continue. The economy fared better as well, up to 101^st from 115^th in 2012. More of us were happier with our living standards and 61.8 per cent of people in Pakistan expressed confidence in financial institutions. If there had been an across-the-board deterioration on all indices, then there would be cause, if not for concern but outright alarm, and that is not so. Outside of the world of numbers and analysis, there really has at a both subjective and objective level been an improvement in safety and security across the country in the last year. Parts of the country remain desperately unsafe, but other — larger — parts have become perceptibly safer. Our governance may be colourless and sometimes downright inept — but not all of it and not all the time everywhere. Read between the lines — it is not all bad news.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 11^th, 2015.

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