THE World Bank’s Reclaiming Momentum Towards Prosperity report presents a sobering reality: poverty has climbed back to 25.3 per cent on the national line; and close to 45pc of Pakistanis fall below the bank’s new $4.20-a-day threshold. Stabilising our way into deeper poverty has exposed the limits of conventional macroeconomic management. Speaking last week at the International Conference on Inclusive and Resilient Economic Empowerment and Growth, organised by the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund in Islamabad, I put one question at the centre: how do we break this cycle?

Accelerating growth requires recognising where real growth originates. Pakistan’s largest capital investment of this decade never appeared in a Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP), Annual Development Programme (ADP), or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). Farmers, shopkeepers and households imported about 17 gigawatts of solar panels in 2024, and the same again in 2025. No PC-1. No donor. No climate finance unit. They used their own savings, because diesel costs and the unwinding of unsustainable energy subsidies made it rational.

The lesson for macroeconomic policy is direct. Prolonged, distorted subsidies are not a safety net. They are an obstacle to citizen-led growth. When fiscal pressure forced the state to pare them back, citizens moved faster than planners to protect their own balance sheets. The state’s response was to tax panel imports and revise net-metering terms. So when we ask how planning can accelerate growth, we should first admit that citizens are already ahead of the plan. The question is whether the state will remove the friction in their way or keep chasing donors. Three shifts would make the........

© Dawn