Every morning that Pakistan's decision-makers delay action, a small business closes, a file gathers dust and a young entrepreneur gives up and books a flight abroad.
BUSINESS & ECONOMIC PLANNING
Every morning that Pakistan's decision-makers delay action, a small business closes, a file gathers dust and a young entrepreneur gives up and books a flight abroad.
China did not grow because it planned better. It grew because it decided -- and then moved. I went to China expecting to understand their culture and economic plans. I came back thinking about their habits. It started on a quiet morning in Shenzhen. A young officer, barely in his thirties, walked me through a small business facilitation centre. No grand building. No motivational slogans on the walls. Just desks, screens and a steady flow of people getting things done.
A woman had come to register her business. I asked him, almost as an afterthought, how long it would take. "Two days”, he said. Then he paused and smiled. "If we take longer, we have to explain why”. It sounded almost unremarkable. But it stayed with me for the rest of the trip.
Later that week, I met a local official over tea. I had expected him to talk about targets, investment figures, or the latest Five-Year Plan. He did not. Instead, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small notebook, the kind you buy at a corner shop. "These", he said, placing them on the table, "are my weekly tasks”. There were no grand speeches in that notebook. No vision statements. Just actions. Approve this permit. Resolve that complaint. Clear this backlog by Friday. "This is how the plan works”, he said, tapping the cover gently. I had been looking for the architecture of Chinese development. I had found it in a pocket notebook.
On another afternoon, we visited an industrial cluster on the city's edge. Nothing extraordinary at first glance, mid-sized factories, workers moving in quiet rhythm, trucks loading goods in the heat. But the longer I stayed, the more I noticed what was absent. No generators were humming against power cuts. No officials are being called to chase approvals. No owner on his phone trying to track down a file. Electricity was stable. Roads were functional. Permits had been processed. Nobody was talking about policy. Everyone was talking about work. One factory owner told me plainly: "If something breaks, the district office fixes it. Fast. Otherwise, they get into trouble, not me”. That one sentence explained more than any policy paper I had read in the preceding year.
On my last evening, I asked a young researcher what he thought made their system genuinely different. He was quiet for a moment, looking into his tea. "We don't wait for the plan to work”, he finally said. "We make small things work every day”. I did not write it down. I did not need to.
On the flight home, somewhere over the dark stretch between the Gulf and Karachi, I kept thinking about Pakistan. We also have plans. Vision documents. National frameworks. Long-term strategies with ambitious targets and impressive graphics. We write them well. We launch them with press conferences and ministerial speeches. But somewhere between the document and the district, things disappear. A file sits on a desk. A permit takes six weeks. A decision that should take a morning takes a quarter. Nobody notices. Nobody is asked to explain.
What I saw in China was not a perfect system. It was a disciplined one. Plans were not treated as public promises. They were treated as instructions given to officers. Every official knew what had to be done this week, not in five years. And if it was not done, there was a record of why. The accountability was not dramatic. It was just constant.
Consider what something similar might look like here. Not a new plan. Just a new habit. Pick a handful of districts. Reduce business registration to three steps. Set a hard time limit of five working days. If a file is delayed beyond that, the system flags it automatically, and someone must explain the gap in writing. No ceremony required. No ribbon cutting. Just implementation.
Or something even simpler: every government office publishes, on its wall and online, exactly how long each of its services takes to deliver. Every delay is recorded. Not to punish arbitrarily, but to make time visible, because right now, time is our largest hidden tax on enterprise. A small business owner in Faisalabad or Hyderabad should never have to take a day off work to follow up on a file that should have moved on its own.
China did not transform overnight. It experimented. It failed in places. It adjusted and scaled what worked. Under Deng Xiaoping, reforms began in a few special zones with targeted policies. Only when they proved themselves were they extended. The discipline was not just in execution; it was in sequencing. We tend to do the opposite. We announce everything at once and end up doing nothing particularly well.
There is another difference that I keep returning to. In China, the state does not try to do everything. It tries to make sure things get done. Markets produce. The state removes the obstacles to production. Here, we often reverse that logic. We announce projects, subsidies and launch schemes. But the small, everyday barriers, the approvals, the delays, the quiet uncertainty that makes investors hesitate, remain untouched. And that is precisely where growth quietly dies. Not in the headlines. In the waiting room.
China did not grow because it planned better than everyone else. It grew because it executed better. After all, somewhere, at every level, someone was responsible for ensuring that a small task was completed on time. Every day. Without exception.
Pakistan does not need another plan. It needs a system that works on a Monday morning. Where a business can register without spending a week in queues. Where a file moves without someone's personal intervention. Where a decision is made before the investor loses patience and looks elsewhere.
On my last morning in Shenzhen, I passed that same facilitation centre one more time. The young officer was inside. He waved through the glass. The queue was moving. Slowly, steadily, without fuss. No one was making a speech. No one was announcing a reform or unveiling a framework. But something important was happening all the same. Work was getting done.
And perhaps that is the only lesson worth carrying home. Not what to plan. But how, finally, to act. If Pakistan's policymakers want to know whether their reforms are real, there is a simple test. Walk into any district office this Monday morning. Try to register a business. Time it. If it takes more than five days, the next vision document is not a strategy; it is a confession. The world does not wait for the next planning commission. Neither should Pakistan.
China did not grow because it planned better than everyone else. It grew because it executed better. After all, somewhere, at every level, someone was responsible for ensuring that a small task was completed on time
The writer is a professor of economics at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) and founder of The Pakonomist.
