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AT this difficult time in its history, Pakistan has one of the most competent teams of economic managers in place in years. They are stars from the field of finance, development, planning and investment banking.
Given the right amount of political space, they have the ability to turn around the faltering economy.
The budget they have presented for consideration to the National Assembly would do little to move the economy from the slump in which it has been wallowing now for past few years and get it moving again. They could have done a number of things by applying their collective experience. This did not happen apparently because the political bosses did not give them the freedom for manoeuvre.
The first, of course, is the country’s dismal resource situation. As has been said repeatedly, the country continues to slip in terms of collecting a reasonable amount of national income as taxes.
Today Pakistan has one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the world. It will be a bit more than nine per cent when the 2010-11 financial year finally closes. The budgetary proposals presented to the parliament by Finance Minister Hafiz Sheikh will push it up to about 10 per cent. However, given the past record, even this modest increase may not be achieved.
There are several unpleasant consequences of this. The most depressing of these is that the government does not have much left in its hands to pay for social services the poor need and deserve.
Pakistan has a dismal record of human development. Its population of some 180 million remains poorly educated and in poor health. These conditions will not improve unless the public sector spends more on education and health.
The other side of the resource coin is government’s non-development expenditure. It is widely known that there is an enormous amount of waste in the way it spends its meagre resources.
The finance minister should have addressed this issue more fully and with resolution. He also needed to lay out a credible plan for addressing waste and inefficiency in the way large public sector corporations are being managed.
Managers of most of these poorly performing entities have been appointed on the basis of their links with those in power rather than on the basis of competence. It is not surprising that they are a huge drain on the public exchequer.
The finance minister did well when he had the portfolio of privatisation in one of the administrations of the Pervez Musharraf period. He could have used that experience to lay down a strategy and a plan for handing over some of these enterprises to the private sector.
This brings us to the issue of the fiscal deficit which has been the Achilles heel of the management of the Pakistani economy. The budget, with an eye on the on-going discussions with the IMF, promises to reduce this to four per cent of GDP. Whether this will help to win the support of the Fund will depend on how that institution sees the tax effort in light of the country’s history.
The managers of the economy have once again decided not to touch agriculture as a source of revenue. This means they were not able to overcome the resistance of the big farmers who have managed to get their sector exempt from income tax. The constitution does not allow federal income tax to be levied from agriculture, but Islamabad can exert pressure on the provinces to take care of this sector which accounts for over one-fifth of the national income. During my brief tenure as the de facto finance minister in 1996-97, the access of the provinces to the resources in the Divisible Pool was made conditional upon raising income tax from agriculture.
We prescribed two per cent of agricultural income as the minimum for drawing from the divisible pool. Unfortunately this was not looked at as a condition in the Seventh National Commission award announced at the end of 2009 but it could have been done retroactively in the budget. But that required political will.
The budget speech also promises to reduce the rate of inflation by half, to nine per cent in 2011-12. The assumption here is that a smaller fiscal deficit will reduce the printing of money for financing which in turn, by decreasing the supply of money, will bring down inflation.
This is not a credible position to take since the fiscal deficit not be reduced to the promised level nor the resort to the printing press will be curtailed. It is very unlikely that inflation will come down that rapidly. It is important to be honest with the citizenry.
Where will this budget take the economy over the next financial year? The answer unfortunately is not very far. It will not revive economic growth, not reduce the dependence on foreign flows, not reduce the incidence of poverty nor lessen the gap between the rich and the poor, and not help to integrate the economy with rest of the world. Something better was expected from a team of this talent and experience.
