OPINION: If wishes were horses: the USD 63bn export illusion |
Pakistan is once again chasing a number. This time it is a neat, round, headline-friendly USD 63 billion in exports by 2029, floated as the condition for finally breaking free from the IMF. It sounds ambitious. It sounds confident. It sounds reassuring at a time of fatigue. It also sounds eerily familiar. And that familiarity is precisely the problem.
For decades, Pakistan has been announcing export targets the way it announces national days, ritually, confidently, and with very little consequence attached to failure. Numbers are unveiled with solemnity, press releases follow, presentations circulate, and then the economy carries on exactly as before. When targets are missed, there is no reckoning—only a new number, usually larger, and usually further into the future.
There is a long and well-documented history in this country of mistaking targets for strategy. We announce numbers with conviction, present them as destiny, and then act surprised when the economy refuses to obey speeches. Exports, unfortunately, do not grow because a minister says they must. They grow because firms become more productive, costs become competitive, policy becomes predictable, and capital is allowed to take risk without fear of retrospective punishment. None of those conditions can be summoned by declaration.
Let us start with the arithmetic, because numbers are less sentimental than policy documents. Pakistan’s exports today sit somewhere between USD 35 and USD 40 billion, depending on the year and exchange-rate effects. To reach USD 63 billion within four to five years, exports would need to grow at roughly........