The budget 2024-25 stands announced and contrary to one’s expectations turns out to be quite an anti-climax. Optimism had been building that with the induction of a finance minister from the private sector and one with rather impressive credentials, the budget will be structured in a way that not only takes Pakistan towards growth but also innovatively addresses the fundamental weaknesses in Pakistan’s operative environment. Sadly, it instead reads as steps that will further erode domestic manufacturing, stifle SMEs – the engine of growth and employment in any economy -, discourage exports, stoke inflation, likely to lead to further currency devaluations and perhaps most damagingly, a document that rakes in hypocrisy.

Despite reservations and criticism by many on the finance minister in effect hailing from a predominantly rent-seeking sector and therefore, a visionary approach based on behaviour economics may not come to him naturally, one was still expecting better! And it is in this context that in trying to analyse the budget one will not be dwelling on numbers and instead, try and focus on what actually the budgetary announcements entail in terms of determining the direction of the economy and on various sectoral developments that are likely to come about due to it. Reducing the size of the government: It is common knowledge now that Pakistan supports one of the most top-heavy governments as a percentage of GDP and that both, the government’s footprint and size have been increasingly over the years.

The need of the hour was to not only reduce the size of the government, but to also instil an element of accountability that correlates remunerations or even job security to performance. The country’s economic history is full of material evidences pointing to the role of poor governance, corruption, incompetence, non-transparent operational management and nepotism by bureaucracy and the political decision-making elites, to lead us to the present impasse. Even if the tangible numerical reduction from........

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