This is the second of a two-part series on Pakistani administration’s focus on domestic factors while ignoring external factors which have a much greater relevance in formulation of our domestic economic policies.

Pakistani finance ministers have consistently laid the blame for a sustained fragile economy - the outcome of bust and boom cycles leading to periodic serious balance of payments issues necessitating multilateral/bilateral support - on the opposition for launching a shutter-down strike in major cities which, as per a recent guesstimate by the Ministry of Finance, accounts for a loss of 190 billion rupees per day - an amount largely attributable to a cessation of wholesale and retail trade, the largest component of the services sector, and not related to a decline in productivity.

The reasons for the shutter-down strikes have been almost exclusively political; ranging from charges of rigging in the elections, the alleged political victimization of leadership, challenging specific legislation that is deemed to be targeted against the opposition, and as an after-thought in some protest movements to poorly performing macroeconomic indicators - rising poverty levels, inflation, and unemployment.

In an attempt to strengthen its narrative that it is the only party with the overarching objective of achieving public-centric economic growth (through mega infrastructure projects that contractually favour the producers rather than the public an example being energy projects), backed by in-house expertise, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) came up with what it believes to this day is a winning slogan: a charter of the economy.

This slogan was first raised by Ishaq Dar, four-time finance minister of this hapless country, who during his last eleven-month stint (October 2022 to August 2023) brought the country to the verge of default with a........

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