IN a welcome development, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has announced that he would hold monthly meetings with the business community to ensure regular consultation and collective ownership of economic reforms.
During an interactive session with top industrialists and business leaders from key sectors of the economy, he said the next objective of his government will be to steer Pakistan toward sustained growth, enhance exports, create jobs and attract foreign investment while future development is to be driven by domestic resource mobilization. The Prime Minister chaired a meeting to review performance of the agriculture sector and gave instructions to the relevant authorities to present a comprehensive action plan to boost agricultural production and introduce agriculture reforms in the country.
Policies and programmes conceived and launched in a vacuum never produce the intended results and therefore, it is imperative to get timely input from various stakeholders to ensure their efficacy and success. In this backdrop, the decision of the Prime Minister to have regular monthly consultations with representatives of the industrial and business community is a step in the right direction. However, the process will yield desired results only if this input is used appropriately at the planning and decision-making stages. The objectives that the government is aiming at make it all the more important to take all stakeholders along as decisions made in drawing rooms have not led to any meaningful change in the ground situation. Sustained growth will remain an elusive dream if industrialization and agriculture development are not pursued in the right earnest, ensuring an effective check on the rising cost of doing business. Ineffectiveness of our industrial and agricultural policies and measures is evident from negligible foreign direct investment, sluggish growth in exports and a virtual decline in agricultural productivity. The intention to index future development with domestic resource mobilization is understandable as the country cannot afford continued accumulation of debt, which consumes our precious resources. However, the scarcity of domestic resources makes it imperative to review our development priorities with focus on projects and programmes that could strengthen Pakistan’s capability to pay back and create much-needed job opportunities in view of the alarming rise in the unemployment rate. There is also a need to ensure transparency in the decision-making process of the government as necessitated by repeated scandals vis-à-vis export and import of sugar and manipulation of its prices in the domestic market. The government derives satisfaction from increased tax collection from the industry but in reality this has been extracted from pockets of consumers as prices were jacked up from Rs.130 to Rs. 190 within a few months of the decision to allow export of the commodity.
