There is an across the political divide consensus on ensuring private sector as the engine of growth with the historic modus operandi being to extend incentives at the taxpayers’ expense - fiscal, monetary and utility subsidies - justified on the grounds that it would reduce unemployment (which currently stands at 22 percent) and allow wealth to trickle down (a theory clearly debunked with 44.7 percent Pakistanis living below the poverty line today).

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its 10 October 2024 documents zeros in on the root of the problem that accounts for the country currently being on the twenty-fourth programme loan: “a tight correlation between Pakistan’s boom-bust economic outcomes and its macroeconomic policies.” From 2008 to-date Pakistan secured five IMF programme loans by agreeing to implement critical reforms but abandoning implementation as and when the balance of payment crises eased.

The 2008 loan was suspended in 2010 due to failure to implement agreed tax and power sector reforms. In 2013, the PML-N government contracted a Fund loan, which was completed in 2016; however, reforms did not target the solution of the boom-bust cycle leading to the government initiating negotiations for yet another Fund loan by 2017 (appropriately deferred till after the 2018 elections).

The claim by the PML-N stalwarts that the economy was on an upward trajectory during their tenure and source the decline to PTI’s administration is debunked by the first para of the June 2019 IMF document titled Request for extended arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility: “misaligned economic policies, including large fiscal deficits, loose monetary policy, and........

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