THINGS were not supposed to turn out this way. Pakistan was supposed to become a better place for the governed once governance passed from the hands of people who had limited contact with the populace to those who were the people’s elected representatives.

That happened more than four months ago but the trajectory of the steep economic decline that began in 2007 has continued. The gulf between those who govern and whom they govern has widened. There is an amazing disconnect between the political establishment and the citizenry on one issue that matters the most — economic growth and economic well-being of the population.

That the people are suffering under the heavy burden of so many different weights could not possibly have escaped the attention of those who occupy positions of power in Islamabad. They are politicians and they must be listening. But if that is the case, why are they not acting? Why hasn’t anybody in power not delivered a strong message that touches on at least three things: Why has Pakistan’s economy unravelled so quickly? What does the government propose to do to put the economy back on track? How can the people help by moving forward the process of adjustment?

Let me begin with the point about unravelling. Some of us knew that the model of development followed by the administration of President Pervez Musharraf was not sustainable. That was for many reasons. It depended on the goodwill of foreign governments and on the confidence in Pakistan’s economic future on the part of foreign investors. It did not include generating resources from within the economy as one of the important components of the government’s strategy, if such a strategy existed.

Foreign governments could change their mind if the policies followed by Islamabad were not to their liking. Foreign investors could lose confidence if they did not like the track the economy was following. Both have happened; certainly in the case of the latter. There is growing concern in many western capitals that Pakistan has gone off course.The model was also not sustainable since it allowed the private sector unchecked space within which to operate. Even Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, had recognised two centuries ago that while the quest for private profit was good for the overall health of the economy — there was considerable social utility in private greed, he wrote — the governments must have the will and the capacity to apply checks and controls when circumstances justified such interventions. The Musharraf government allowed the private sector freedom without appropriate checks and balances.

It also contributed to the weakening of the state. Although it concentrated an enormous amount of authority in its own hands, the regime did not develop the institutional capacity to handle it. It also sucked away power from the provinces, leaving them increasingly dependent on central direction and federal largesse. These moves towards centralisation were followed even within the federal government. First the Ministry of Finance and then the Prime Minister’s Secretariat became the repositories of power. But the power that was accumulated was exercised without any careful strategic thinking.

The third deep flaw in the ‘Musharrafian’ model was a by-product of the second. It did not show concern about the very uneven distribution of the rewards of growth among different segments of the population and among different parts of the country. The result is that today Pakistan has one of the most skewed distributions of income and wealth in the developing world.

That these are some of the several flaws in the approach to development pursued by the previous government is now well recognised. What has not been worked out in any kind of strategic detail is how the situation can be remedied. Some of us advocated the issuance of a clear-cut statement by the new rulers on the course they wished to follow in the first 100 days they were in office. That was done but the programme laid down — if it can be called that — was not detailed enough or imaginative enough or sufficiently tuned to the conditions in Pakistan to make a difference to the course the economy was following. In August, Pakistan’s economic situation is worse than what it was in March when the transfer of political authority took place.

In the meantime, the country’s external circumstances continue to worsen. Pakistan, heavily dependent on oil imports, has had to deal with an unrelenting increase in the price of the commodity. It had also to accommodate the sharp increases in food and edible oil prices in the international commodity markets. The situation is such that any further postponement of action would weigh very heavily on the already burdened economy.

The government needs to move on four fronts simultaneously. It needs to focus on its own finances, raising more resources through better tax administration and controlling its expenditures. Attention needs to be given to non-development expenditures. Watching the way the government’s senior officials are moving around the globe in large numbers does not give me the sense of a country faced with a serious financial crisis.

Second, the government needs to bring down the expenditure on imports. The drain on the accumulated foreign exchange reserves continues at an unsustainable rate. The usable reserves are much lower than the estimate put out by the government since the latter also includes bank holdings.

The third area that needs the government’s attention is help to the poor and unemployed. I have been advocating the launch of large urban and rural works programmes that will provide incomes to the poor in return for labour for community development projects. The expenditure on such a programme should come from reductions in government activities that are generally wasteful and don’t contribute anything to good governance or to development.

Finally, the provinces should be asked to develop their own fiscal and expenditure programmes. Greater space should be given to them to raise their own resources for undertaking high-priority programmes. This would bring government closer to the people and also reduce the burden on the federal system.

There may be some appetite among the donors who regard Pakistan as too important a country to fail. Approaching them with a well-developed strategy for adjustment, reform and sustained development might get them interested. The ball is in Islamabad’s court. One can only hope that it will have the political will to play it.

Scientists have developed a revolutionary vaccine that could protect billions of people against the world’s deadliest disease: malaria. The team — whose results were published in the journal Nature Medicine last week — have created a vaccine that provided complete protection when tested on animals.

Now the group, which includes British, Irish, French and US researchers, is preparing to launch human vaccine trials. ‘The crucial point about the technology we have developed to create this vaccine is that it could be used not just to take on malaria but to fight other diseases for which we still have no vaccine, for example HIV,’ said project leader Simon Draper of Oxford University.

Malaria infects more than 500 million people every year and kills two to three million, most of them young children living in sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia. The disease is a key cause of poverty and a major hindrance to economic development. People become infected when bitten by a mosquito carrying the malaria parasite.

The parasite migrates to the liver, then erupts to spread through the bloodstream, destroying red blood corpuscles which carry oxygen from lungs to muscles. Symptoms include respiratory problems, anaemia and brain damage. If untreated, patients often slip into a coma and die.

Anti-malarial drugs are effective, but too expensive for poor countries. So to develop a one-off vaccine scientists have concentrated on two approaches. The first uses deactivated — or attenuated — parasites in order to trigger immune responses. The second involves isolating just one piece of the parasite’s protein coat. This can then be grown in genetically modified bacteria and injected into individuals.

To date, however, neither approach — although effective with the majority of diseases — has worked with malaria. So Draper and his team — funded by Britain’s Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust — took a completely different approach.

‘We used a virus — the adenovirus that causes the common cold — which we genetically engineered so it contained a piece of the malaria parasite’s coat,’ Draper said. ‘If you inject this modified virus into the bloodstream, it triggers the manufacture of antibodies — a special form of immune defence — that will attack malaria parasites.

‘This is the first time that modified viruses have been used to trigger antibodies, which are the best form of immune defence for blocking malarial parasites.’

— The Guardian, London