We keep on hearing from the government on its macro stabilisation of the economy, fair point, but the time has come to now move towards homegrown growth to tackle the mounting problems of investment, employment generation, equitable distribution and poverty alleviation.

I won’t go into the previously covered details (in my weekly pieces) on governmental policy failures on competitiveness, taxation and declining ease of doing business in Pakistan, but will suffice to say that if we have to make any headway from here on, a new set of generational reforms is long overdue and must be undertaken post haste. All such past announcements, by various economic managers, can at best be regarded as announcements with a long footnote of scepticism. In my long span of covering public policy, I have seen every finance minister make this claim—great headlines for the next day’s newspaper, but amounting to little in practice. Not surprising, since given the political risk and the consequent ask, the kind of prudent reform efforts that are required on rooting out deeply embedded corruption, rent seeking, intertwining of power and business ventures and an overly large footprint of the government, all are quite difficult to sustain, especially due to a result of a powerful ecosystem of graft involving all arms of the administration, something that is deeply invested in preventing any kind of transparency or an independent oversight of the reform process itself. The examples in routine daily life are many & quite glaring, ranging from even small tasks like registering a will, a wedding, sale or purchase of a house, CNIC, tax returns and so on. Nothing works without greasing the system. Ironically, there are enough reports even within the government........

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