Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Development, Planning, and Special Initiatives, Professor Ahsan Iqbal, in his address, put forward the fact that political instability and adventurism have been the biggest threat to Pakistan’s economy.
He was speaking at a Round Table Conference on Pakistan’s Economics jointly organized by the Planning Ministry and the Lahore School of Economics in Lahore.
The Minister said in 2018, the going out Government’s Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) was worth Rs 1000 billion, and Defence Budget was Rs 1000 billion as well – Whereas in 2022, the PSDP was reduced to merely Rs 500 Billion or less and PTI’s government started to default on public payments in their last financial quarter.
Prof Iqbal said that to earn policy dividend, there needs to be stable as policies take root, grow, evolve, and start bearing fruits over a decade or so – Thus, policy efforts to expand the resource base of Pakistan (undertaken by the PML N’s government in its tenure) failed to bear fruits because they became victim to political instability.
The Planning Ministry further added that the ongoing debate around the economy must not discount the political landscape and its challenges as economic measures or woes are not in.
Ahsan Iqbal says Pakistan must expand energy capability
He said in this Vision 2010, it was identified that Pakistan must expand its energy capacity (despite the fact that Pakistan was an energy surplus in the 90s). However, the democratic government was thrown out, and as a result, Pakistan faced one of the worst energy crises in 2010 and onwards.
Similarly, the Minister said that in 2013, his office came up with Vision 2025, which envisioned Pakistan becoming one of the top 25 economies by 2025.
The government took all measures to actualize this goal by overcoming law and order issues, defeating terrorism, and breaking energy and infrastructure bottlenecks (through CPEC) – As a result, think tanks like PWC started predicting that Pakistan could become a top 25 economy by 2025.
Minister Iqbal said that PML-N’s government, for the first time, transformed Pak-China strategic relations into economic relations. As a result, billions of dollars of investment started to pour into infrastructure/energy and other sectors. Thar Coal, a national resource, was tapped for the first time ever.
He said that the entire momentum that Pakistan picked up from 2013-18 got lost to the adventurism of Tabdeeli.
