Pakistan is not short of economic plans. We have had five-year plans, annual plans, vision documents, export strategies, industrial policies, energy policies, investment policies, privatisation programmes and reform agendas. Governments change. Ministers change. Acronyms change. Conferences are held. Targets are announced.

Yet remarkably similar problems survive every plan.

Projects take years longer than intended. Investors move from one department to another. Federal and provincial priorities collide. Decisions taken at the top become files somewhere below.

Pakistan may therefore be diagnosing the wrong disease. Our biggest economic problem may not be the absence of good policy. It may be the absence of a chain of command for economic execution.

That distinction matters. A strategy answers the question: What should we do? A chain of command answers a harder question: who exactly is responsible for getting it done, by when, and what happens if it is not done? Pakistan has traditionally been much better at answering the first question than the second.

Pakistan’s accountability bodies have themselves been accused of selective and political use, which is why officials do not trust vague assurances of good faith.

Pakistan’s accountability bodies have themselves been accused of selective and political use, which is why officials do not trust vague assurances of good faith.

The numbers expose the consequences. The Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26 puts the investment-to-GDP ratio at only 14.38 per cent, barely moved from 14.42 per cent a year earlier, even as real GDP growth reached 3.7 per cent in FY2026. Something deeper than instability is holding investment back.

The IMF has offered a clue. Its assessment of Pakistan’s public investment system found an efficiency gap of around 38 per cent, and a pipeline of development projects with a “throw-forward” equivalent to roughly 14 years. In FY2025, the cost to complete existing projects was nearly ten times the annual budget allocated for them. Pakistan is not merely short of money. It is attempting more than its institutional machinery can finish. A corporation run this way would not commission another strategy. Its board would ask why projects were approved without funding, who owned each delivery milestone, and why new initiatives kept starting before old ones finished.

There is a useful, if uncomfortable, comparison here. When Pakistan faces a security challenge or an emergency where failure is not an option, institutional behaviour changes.........

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