For four decades, Pakistan has largely planned with spreadsheets, intuition, and press conferences. What we have not done at least not at scale is simulate policies before launch and then monitor whether promised results actually arrived. We built “monitoring cells” without monitoring systems. The result is short-term firefighting, long-term drift, and a data pipeline that too often fails the very ministries tasked with steering the economy. What I call “press conference economics”.

The price of flying blind

When a tariff is tweaked or a sales tax is nudged by 1%, the shock ripples through prices (CPI), jobs, exports, provincial revenues, and household welfare. Countries that treat the economy as a system run those “what-ifs” through integrated models before acting, we usually don’t. Insiders at planning commission, Ministry of Finance will recognize the culture: ad-hoc “quick looks,” post-hoc justifications, and what one senior official described to me as “jhatka” fixes shocks meant to show action rather than deliver measurable outcomes(a bureaucratic colloquialism not a method).

Meanwhile, the data itself hasn’t helped. The finance minister recently criticized the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) for forcing policy to rely on outdated indicators concerns widely reported in the press. In parallel, the IMF has asked Pakistan to explain roughly $11 billion in trade-data discrepancies between two government systems over the last two fiscal years exactly the kind of problem a governed data fabric would surface and resolve faster. Dr. Aneel Salman’s “The Price of Statistical Silence” underscores the same point: inconsistent systems create large statistical gaps that corrode trust.

The same simulation logic

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