MUCH will be written about the budget’s specifics, but there is something else on my mind this year. This budget marks nearly a quarter century of back-to-back, virtually nonstop IMF programmes that Pakistan has been on. This means for 25, or a quarter of a century now, we have had a near continuous run of austerity as national economic policy, with the exception of three brief spurts of short-lived growth in between. And even those were fuelled by external, debt -reating inflows.

We could take this story further back perhaps. But the year 2000 forms a good cut-off point because it also saw the implementation of a tough IMF Stand-by Arrangement, the same as the one today, following months of a troubled programme. The outlines of that programme, as well as each one that followed, were the same. So the wheel has turned full circle from that point — a short and tough stand-by, followed by a longer and more sustained Extended Fund Facility, and today, we stand in the same moment we were in the summer of 2001.

A quarter of a century of back-to-back IMF programmes and their attendant austerity measures have left the country deeply scarred. Twenty-five budgets have come and gone between then and now. Yet like then, the weight of our external debt, the narrowness and rigidity of the state’s revenue base, its ailing and dilapidated power system, burgeoning population of barely literate and poorly nourished youth, and deteriorating social indicators have all taken a toll.

Today, economic policy in Pakistan........

© Dawn