APROPOS the article ‘Economics beyond the ordinary’ (Sept 17). The writer has fittingly portrayed the grim reality that the policies and policymakers in Pakistan mutually target traditional measures of welfare.

These yardsticks include gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national income (GNI) in particular. This approach to economic development is old.

The horizons of economic development have broadened over the decades. Even Sigmund Kuznets, the ideologue of GDP, admitted himself that it did not measure the overall welfare of the people in an economy. This simply implies that economic development is more than the statistics of paleoconservative measures.

The modern understanding of development is multidimensional. In the 1970s, Dudley Seers, a British economist, criticised the bubble growth in the post-World War-II period. He concluded that the aid programmes such as the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, though they served to boost GDP and GNI, the living standard of masses remained stagnant.

Real development, according to Seers, was providing education, reducing inequality, participating in government, and addressing unemployment.

Similarly, Denis Goulet, an American economist and the founder of development ethics, observes that to understand development one must realise the consequences of underdevelopment. The consequences included inability to attain basic needs of life, death owing to hunger and disease and the invisible miseries of absolute poverty.

Furthermore, Amartya Sen’s capability approach also emphasises the same. Sen notes that real development is a process of enhancing people’s capabilities by expanding their real freedoms.

Policies in Pakistan hardly follow the guidelines directed by Seers, Goulet, and Sen excluding other egalitarian concepts of development and lags in almost all these social indicators.

Pakistan ranks at 152 out of 189 countries in Human Development Index (HDI) ranking by the UNDP. The literacy rate is 57 per cent, according to Pakistan Economic Survey 2019-20. Likewise, According to Trading Economics, the unemployment rate in Pakistan is expected to trend around six per cent in 2021.

Income inequality is measured in terms of Gini Coefficient score. Accordingly, it has risen from 0.35pc in 1987-88 to 36.2pc in 2018. Poverty statistics were last updated in 2015-16. Given these outdated statistics any hope to eradicate poverty remains bleaker.

In the Human Freedom Index, this country holds 140th position out of 162 countries. Last but not least, Pakistan scores 32 out of 100 in the latest Freedom in the World Report published by Freedom House.

Addressing all these issues requires governance reforms. Paul Collier in his book The Bottom Billion conforms the same.

Rescheduling priorities and updating the policy structures is the only solution. The Covid-19 pandemic is a ‘blessing in disguise’ as our prime minister puts quotes it. Issues ranging from illiteracy to civil liberties are all intertwined.

Solving one paves the way for the resolution of the other. During this crucial time, I urge the policymakers to reshape policies accordingly and broaden the spectra of their target.

Ali Afzal Wassan
Khairpur Mirs

Published in Dawn, October 1st, 2020