PAKISTAN’S persistently low GDP growth has bred impatience. Rising poverty, stubborn unemployment and compressed household demand have fuelled calls to exit the IMF programme or roll back its conditionalities. High taxes, an elevated policy rate and expensive energy are cited as evidence that stabilisation has come at the cost of growth. While the frustration is understandable, framing the debate as a choice between IMF discipline and economic recovery is misleading — and dangerous.

What Pakistan needs is not growth at any cost, nor relief measures that benefit a narrow segment of the elite, but quality growth: growth that creates jobs, raises incomes, strengthens exports and expands the tax base. Abandoning the IMF programme would not deliver this. It would simply repeat Pakistan’s cycle of premature stimulus, external account stress and abrupt adjustment — each time leaving the economy weaker and the poor worse off.

The IMF programme was never designed to deliver rapid growth in the short term. Its purpose is to restore macroeconomic stability — a precondition for sustainable expansion. Inflation has begun to ease, the external account has stabilised and fiscal slippages are being contained, albeit slowly. Walking away now without........

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