Pakistan's Development: Successes, Failures, And Future Tasks (Presidential Remarks‪)‬

It is an honour for me as President of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists to welcome you to the 13th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Society. I consider it a great privilege to do so as this Meeting coincides with the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the state of Pakistan, a state which emerged on the map of the postwar world as a result of the Muslim freedom movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Fifty years to the date, we have been jubilant about it, and both as citizens of Pakistan and professionals in the social sciences we have also been thoughtful about it. We are trying to see what development has meant in Pakistan in the past half century. As there are so many dimensions that the subject has now come to have since its rather simplistic beginnings, we thought the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan to be an appropriate occasion for such stock-taking. The movement for independence was driven by the belief that a separate homeland for Muslims would facilitate the achievement of high and equitable growth than would have been the case for them in united free India. It is natural to evaluate the economic performance against expectations of high growth. A definitive evaluation, however, is a difficult exercise due to lack of statistical information as well as a conceptual problem in determining an appropriate counter-factual. The performance of Pakistan economy since independence needs to be compared with the performance of areas constituting Pakistan in the context of a united India. As the proper counterfactual needs to be estimated first, this inherent difficulty forces one to evaluate the extent and quality of growth in Pakistan against the yardstick of growth in other countries either in South Asia or East Asia and Southeast Asia with similar beginnings and a similar counter-factual situation.