April 25, 2002	Thursday	Safar 11, 1423

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ISLAMABAD, April 24: The World Bank (WB) has called for a tension-free South Asia to avoid arm race between the two nuclear rivals— Pakistan and India.

“If regional tensions subsided and the Kashmir dispute were resolved, this could provide a further fiscal cushion from a peace dividend. Conversely, a new arm race with India could be fiscally disastrous”, says a latest report of the World Bank titled ‘Pakistan Development Policy Review, A new Dawn’.

The projected redirection of public expenditure, away from defence and interest and back towards the uplift budget, is fundamental to achieving the growth and social objectives that Pakistan has set for itself, it adds.

The defence spending, the report continues, which had been on a downward trend throughout the 1990s, fell to 4.5 per cent of the GDP in 2000-01. It was projected at 4 per cent of the GDP in 2001-02, with an additional decline to 3.3 per cent of the GDP by 2003-04.

Pakistan has failed to achieve social progress commensurate with its economic growth. For example, while infant mortality and female literacy rates dropped by 73 per cent and 60 per cent from 1960 to 1998 for countries that grew at about the same rate, in Pakistan the declines were of the order of 43 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

The report also calls for professionalization of the civil service by replacing the work force with Information Technology (IT) experts. Although the federal civil service represents a comparatively small proportion of total public employment, reforms are critically important, as they set standards that emulated in regard to both pay and conditions of service in provinces and, to a lesser degree, in state owned enterprises.

In this behalf the World Bank believes that there should be a rightsizing and restructuring of the federal and provincial ministries and departments.

About the access to justice, the report says that the low level of public confidence in the judiciary, and particularly the district courts, is a clear constraint on Pakistan’s economic, political and social uplift. At least eight law reform commissions have been formed since 1858 with strong recommendations to s