Pakistan’s economic journalism had a better week than usual, with stories on exports, food insecurity, energy pricing, Islamic finance, agricultural subsidies, jobs and federalism that moved beyond simple press-release reporting, while the op-eds were sharper. Yet the larger problem remains. Our economic press still reports symptoms more easily than it investigates systems. It records numbers, quotes officials, reproduces chamber complaints, notes donor language and moves to the next event, while what remains missing is institutional memory, local research and the habit of asking why the same problems keep returning.

Take exports. Business Recorder and Profit reported that July exports rose by 10 percent, with textiles leading the increase, but Pakistan has celebrated export upticks many times before and the harder question is whether this is a structural shift or another temporary movement in a familiar cycle. Which firms invested, which markets expanded, were refunds cleared, did energy pricing become competitive, were customs procedures simplified, did tariff policy support exports or revenue extraction, and did productivity improve?

Profit did well to note that consumer-goods imports also rose sharply, warning that an export increase can coexist with the old import-led leakage, but the story needed an export ledger rather than only an export headline. The trade-deficit story made the same point from the other side. A deficit is not simply a bad number; it has a composition. Imports may reflect machinery, raw material, energy dependence or consumption, and each implies a different economy, but our reporting still treats the external account as a scoreboard rather than as evidence of what the economy is producing, importing, consuming and failing to export.

The food-insecurity story was one of the strongest pieces of the week because it challenged a lazy national habit. Pakistan often talks about food security as if the only question is supply, while Profit rightly shifted the issue to affordability: households are not merely facing shortage, they are quietly downgrading diets, consuming less protein, less milk, fewer pulses and more cheap calories. But even here the next step is missing, because food affordability is also about storage, transport, wholesale markets, mandi regulation, support prices, import timing, middlemen, urban retail, competition and logistics. A good story says people cannot afford food; a better story asks which market structures make food expensive between farm and household.

Energy coverage also improved, but again not enough. Dawn’s report on the 75 paisa per unit fuel-cost adjustment was useful because it did not merely report the surcharge; it noted Nepra’s concern over partial loading charges, CPPA’s explanation that rooftop solar has reduced daytime demand, and the warning that wind and solar may need curtailment if demand falls at certain hours. That is the real energy story now. Pakistan is not just facing high tariffs. It is facing a grid-design and management crisis........

© The Friday Times