In the ‘IMF [International Monetary Fund] Country Report No. 25/332’ it could be seen that for reaching the ‘binding’ primary surplus target the health and education related was missed – not to mention in succession over many previous quarters – even when the provincial deficit target was missed, which means that given education and health are primarily provincial matters after the 18th Constitutional Amendment, spending perhaps went mainly towards making non-development expenditures, and not towards these two important sectors, and/or the revenue effort continued to remain weak.

In addition, another contributor to primary surplus came in the shape of government missing its tax refund arrears target, that is, it withheld arrears target, hurting, in turn, business prospects, which already face high levels of cost of doing business.

Very strict emphasis of IMF programme on meeting the fiscal consolidation target – which in the author’s opinion is both in general, and in the specific case of Pakistan, is a fiscal austerity target, given the underlying high pace, and substantial depth of adjustment required in the ongoing extended fund facility (EFF) programme – has continued to be quite a norm in IMF programmes.

OPINION: Growth model and IMF conditionalities — III

The book ‘A thousand cuts: social protection in the age of austerity’ (quoted in earlier parts as well) taking the case in point of West African countries during the time period of 2010-2017 pointed out with regard to the oft-missing of ‘health and other related targets’ as was seen in Pakistan of repeated slippages of health and education related target, during the current EFF programme for instance, as ‘…Table 4.7 shows these targets are frequently unmet in our sample of countries. Of the 313 social spending floors for which we could identify implementation data, only 155 were implemented, about 49.5 percent.’

Moreover, with regard to the lopsided emphasis of programme conditionalities relating to fiscal consolidation, hurting, in turn, health spending, the same book pointed out, ‘As Table 4.8 shows, budget balance conditions were consistently adhered to and often were far exceeded, while at the same time social spending floors remained unmet.’

In fact, the same book indicated that authors ran important regression analyses for the time period 1995 to 2017 for 195 countries, including Pakistan. For instance, one regression analysis pointed out: ‘There is a modest negative association between average annual government health spending as a share of GDP and total........

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