Within economy, relegation of Ministry of Finance (MOF) to purely financial matters, and instead forming a ‘Ministry of Economy’ (MOEC) as the main ministry for the overall economic policy.

Moreover, while the State Bank of Pakistan’s (SBP’s) independence continues to get protected, legislation towards the proposed ‘Economic Resilience Act’ (ERA) should ensure footprint of the proposed MOEC and greater footprint of MOF in the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the SBP; one guiding example could be in the shape of fiscal-monetary policy coordination framework as adopted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

Here, Ministry of Planning, Development & Special Initiatives should be abolished, along with Ministry of Economic Affairs, and within it the debt department. Moreover, MOEC should also nurture active technical collaboration of overall economy, and sectors with international academics, and policy and research institutes for improving knowledge base of policy.

‘Economic Resilience Act’—I

Planning, including industrial policy, overall pricing policy — and subordinating project planning to overall programme planning at the sectoral level – external economic affairs negotiations, and debt management should come within the ambit of MOEC.

For project life cycle or loop, that is, feasibility, release of funds, progress evaluation, and feedback, a ‘Pakistan Development Bank’ should be formulated, which should also highlight development finance needs. Overall, MOEC should also recommend policy for effectively improving the footprint of government in monetary policy committee (MPC) of SBP, and in rationalizing the 18th Constitutional Amendment, and 7th NFC (National Finance Commission) award for better sharing of responsibilities and finances with regard to for instance, interest payment, and welfare needs.

An important feature of economic resilience that should be focused upon is reaching economic data resilience. There should be an independent office called ‘Pakistan Statistics’ (PS), for instance, for the purpose of meeting the criterion of resilient data. PS should be the main provider of all statistics as one window, where producers of a particular statistics, SBP, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), respective ministries also continue to make their statistics public for meeting transparency, and independence of individual sectors. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) should be abolished since it does not provide all the statistics, and replaced with the proposed PS.

The proposed ERA should approach taxation and debt in a non-neoliberal way, whereby for instance, progressive, and broad-based domestic resource mobilization policy should be adopted, along with adopting non-austerity, counter-cyclical policy to check unsustainable build-up of debt.

Serious advocacy should be focused upon by involving, and tasking........

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