In a report released last week, the World Bank stated that Pakistan’s poverty rate was 40.5%. According to the purchasing power parity of 2017, that indicates that approximately 100 million out of the more than 240 million Pakistanis live on less than $3.65 per day. In straightforward words, 100m Pakistanis can’t utilize their everyday pay to purchase today with what they might have purchased with $3.65 in 2017. As a result, they are regarded as poor.
Currently, $3.65 is roughly equivalent to Rs1,000 at the exchange rate. Imagine what goods or services a Pakistani citizen could purchase with this amount in a single day, or how a person earning Rs30,000 per month could live in Pakistan today.
Pakistan still has a long way to go in addressing this significant problem of poverty. Social safety nets like the Benazir Income Support Programme help those who are extremely poor and have a daily income of less than $2.15, or slightly more than 600 Pakistani rupees. However, without expanding employment opportunities and ensuring long-term economic expansion, it is not possible to reduce overall poverty or enable individuals to earn a daily income of more than $3.65.
Since the industrial sector has suffered the most during the past two fiscal years, it is urgently necessary to revive the sector with the goals of increasing employment without compromising labor productivity and allowing export-oriented businesses to export more at a higher price per unit.
Indeed, even inside the little pie of private area business funding, the portion of more modest territories is disproportionally low
In addition, facilitating import limitations has assisted send out businesses with raising their result. According to the most recent estimates from the World Bank, Pakistan’s industrial sector, which includes construction, contracted by 3.7 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively, in FY23 and FY24.
Numerous factors have contributed to the decline of the industrial sector, including a lack of investment, technological advancement, low levels of ease of doing business, productivity, and efficiency, organized and street crimes, energy crises, and infrastructure bottlenecks. These issues are as yet pervasive.
Terrorism and militancy, on the other hand, have always hampered the operation of existing industrial/export zones as well as the establishment of new ones, particularly in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Not only is this issue present, but its scope and severity have recently increased.
In the past, governments have dealt with structural issues with solutions that were better suited to cyclical or temporary problems. One regime’s policy inconsistencies are exposed by another regime, which sometimes partially corrects them. On the other hand, the same regime exposes many more inconsistent policies, which are then partially corrected by the next regime. Furthermore, this never-ending cycle continues.
Inter-provincial discord or a lack of harmony between smaller provinces and the federal government can easily be traced back to our current governance system, which is either democracy with less establishment interference or the widely accepted and practiced hybrid regime. Any strategy for industrial revival will fail to achieve the desired results unless these underlying causes are addressed.
