LAHORE: Glossy presentations have become a substitute for governance. State actors craft reports based not on transparency or ground realities but on wishful thinking. The private sector prepares its own presentations using selective secondary research tailored to protect vested interests.
The result is a national decision-making culture built on PowerPoint slides, not facts. This dependence on secondary research has become a national folly. Every few months, ministries, trade bodies or consultants propose sweeping policy changes -- usually backed by charts copied from global reports or rankings produced by institutions thousands of miles away. These international indices certainly have credibility, but they do not capture the structural weaknesses unique to Pakistan. Using these rankings to prescribe reforms without understanding Pakistan’s institutional decay is like prescribing medicine without examining the patient.
True policymaking must begin with primary research -- real field work, real stakeholder interviews, real data collected from Pakistan’s districts, industries, and institutions. Without it, our reforms remain detached from reality. Globally, countries that transformed themselves -- Vietnam, Indonesia, China -- invested heavily in primary research that accurately mapped the constraints and strengths of their economies. Pakistan, on the other hand, continues to depend on borrowed wisdom and borrowed templates.
Few realise that Pakistan actually has some of the strongest environmental protection laws in the region. The tragedy is that they are almost never implemented. Federal and provincial environment protection agencies (EPAs) are weak, understaffed, and politically controlled. They act on the whims of the ruling elite, turning a blind eye to well-connected industrial polluters while harassing small units to show artificial “performance.” Yet, recommendations continue to be made to “upgrade environmental laws.” No law, no matter how ideal, can compensate for a regulator afraid to act.
The same ritualistic policymaking plagues the power sector. Every year, presentations are made on strategies to reduce line losses and curb power theft. But no amount of new legislation can change the ground reality: distribution companies lack protection from provincial governments. How can a lineman disconnect a defaulting consumer when local political influence shields the thief? Without institutional backing, even the toughest anti-theft laws are meaningless. Yet, reforms are repeatedly presented without addressing the central problem: weak institutions and political interference.
Pakistan’s tax-to-GDP ratio will never rise, not even with the best-designed reforms, until exemptions are eliminated and tax collectors are given genuine autonomy paired with strict accountability.
Pakistan often talks about rewriting laws to match global best practices. But experts caution that even if Pakistan imported the best laws from the world’s most efficient economies, nothing would change until institutions are empowered to implement those laws. Countries that top global ease-of-doing-business rankings have one thing in common: strong, autonomous and disciplined regulatory institutions that operate without fear or favour. Pakistan’s regulatory bodies, on the other hand, often operate with fear -- and almost always with favour.
Experts are now urging private sector associations, academics, and policy researchers to finally invest in primary research to identify the real bottlenecks in governance. Pakistan does not need more presentations. It needs evidence-based policy grounded in local realities.
Pakistan stands at a crossroads. Either it continues with cosmetic reforms based on borrowed data and fancy slides, or it embraces real reform rooted in primary research and institutional accountability. Only the latter path can rescue the country from its chronic governance failures.
