AT a recent governance conference convened by the Ministry of Planning Development and Special Initiative and the UNDP, I found myself in a pointed exchange with a seasoned businessman.

When I praised the topic of the conference and pointed out that governance and accountability are the ‘mother of all challenges’ hampering Pakistan’s population agenda, he brushed aside the academic jargon. ‘Do we need more talk,’ he asked, ‘or do we need work?’ His skeptical view was rooted in a grim reality he termed the ‘invisible governance tax’, the crushing toll of time and money extracted from citizens every time they navigate a broken bureaucracy to claim their basic rights of getting quality social services.

In Pakistan, taxation is a perennial national obsession. People loudly dissent petroleum levies, lament the sales tax and track dissent petroleum with weary familiarity. Yet there is a more insidious extraction occurring in the shadows, one that never appears in a Finance Bill and is never debated on the floor of the National Assembly. It is the Invisible Tax of a stalled demographic transition and for the Pakistani public, the bill is already overdue. By conservative estimates, Pakistan’s stalled demographic transition costs the economy upward of 3% of GDP annually in foregone productivity, excess dependency burden and preventable maternal and child health expenditure, a figure that dwarfs the entire health budget of most provinces.

This tax is not collected by the government, instead, it is paid in the currency of human potential. It is the price of the long........

© Pakistan Observer