EVERY few months, Pakistani officialdom and its associated stakeholders return to a familiar, comforting refrain: how Pakistan must ‘exit the IMF’. The vocabulary is predictable and well-rehearsed: exports, productivity, human capital, technology, governance, national coordination. These concepts are presented as panaceas, as if merely invoking them charts a path to freedom from the Fund. What is almost always missing is the road to get there. The discussion rarely addresses concrete policy actions, operational instruments and institutional changes needed to achieve the objective. Wishes are communicated as targets, outcomes are mistaken for reforms, and reform itself is reduced to rhetoric.

Most ‘exit plans’ suffer from a basic flaw which confuses aspirations with instruments. Saying exports must rise is not a policy. Declaring that human capital must improve is not reform. Calling for better coordination or implementation is not an economic strategy. These are desired results, not mechanisms. The real question is far simpler and far more uncomfortable: what specific changes will alter behaviour tomorrow morning?

This confusion is not accidental. Pakistan does not return to the IMF because it lacks ideas or plans. It returns because the design of its economic system systematically produces balance-of-payments crises. IMF dependence is not a technical failure but the predictable outcome of a political economy that rewards rent-seeking, blocks entry, protects incumbents, misprices energy, taxes exports obliquely, and relies on administrative discretion instead of rules. You do not exit the IMF by declaring independence from it. You exit by dismantling the domestic machinery that repeatedly recreates the financing gaps which invite the Fund back into the........

© Dawn