For years, Pakistan’s business community has demanded policy consistency. The demand is understandable. Investors take decisions over long horizons and need confidence that taxes, regulations, tariffs and incentives will not change without warning.
Predictability lowers risk and encourages investment. But a less comfortable point is often missed: consistency is valuable only when the policy being preserved is sound. A bad policy does not become better because it is applied steadily. It merely produces the same poor outcomes with greater regularity.
Pakistan’s economic history offers many examples of such consistency – not in successful reform, but in repeating familiar mistakes while expecting different results.
Take taxation. Successive governments have promised to broaden the base by bringing wholesale and retail trade, transport, real estate and parts of agriculture into the formal net. Each accepts that existing taxpayers carry too much of the burden. Each promises reform.
Yet the outcome barely changes. The formal sector continues to carry a disproportionate share of taxation, while politically difficult sectors remain undertaxed. This is inequitable and discourages investment, formal employment and productivity. What has been consistent is not reform, but the failure to implement it.
Exports tell a similar story. For decades, Pakistan has announced ambitious export targets. The rhetoric rarely changes: export growth is described as the cornerstone of economic strategy; targets are revised upward; new councils, committees and strategies are launched.
But the foundations of competitiveness remain weak. Energy is costly. Logistics are inefficient. Skills development lags behind regional peers. Trade facilitation remains cumbersome. Policy uncertainty returns periodically. The aspiration is consistent; the enabling environment is not.
The power sector offers an even sharper example. For years, Pakistan responded to electricity shortages by adding generation capacity. Installed capacity now exceeds demand, yet consumers face some of the highest tariffs in the region. Industry loses competitiveness, while households struggle with rising bills.
The problem was never generation alone. Transmission and distribution repeatedly failed to keep pace. Planning focused on producing electricity without ensuring it could be delivered efficiently and affordably. The result is capacity payments, underused assets and escalating costs. This is not inconsistency but the consistent repetition of a flawed solution.
Infrastructure planning has followed the same pattern. Gwadar was conceived as a transformational port, capable of connecting Pakistan to regional and global trade corridors. But a port is not an economic ecosystem. Its success depends on roads, railways, logistics networks, industrial zones, urban services and commercial activity. For years, connectivity lagged behind ambition.
Thar offers another example. Its coal resources were identified decades ago as a way to reduce dependence on imported fuels, yet mining, power generation, rail connectivity and industrial usage often progressed on different timelines. Renewable energy capacity, too, has expanded without matching investment in transmission. Components of national strategies have advanced; the systems needed to connect them have progressed more slowly.
The problem is not a shortage of plans. Pakistan produces strategies, visions, roadmaps and targets in abundance. The deeper weakness lies in implementation, coordination and accountability.
Government institutions frequently operate in silos. Ministries pursue their own objectives rather than national outcomes. Projects are approved before complementary investments are secured. Political cycles reward announcements over execution. Bureaucratic incentives reward activity rather than results.
Above all, policies often survive long after evidence shows they are not working.
Countries that transformed their economies were not merely consistent. They were capable of learning. Vietnam, Bangladesh, South Korea and China adjusted policies when circumstances changed or outcomes fell short. They retained strategic direction while remaining flexible in execution. Success came from correcting mistakes and scaling what worked.
Pakistan often confuses persistence with discipline. There is merit in policy stability. Investors need confidence that rules will not change arbitrarily. But stability should not mean preserving ineffective arrangements indefinitely or preventing governments from correcting failed policies.
The objective should be consistency of purpose, not consistency of error. A country should remain steadfast in pursuing growth, exports, investment, employment and prosperity. But the policies used to achieve these aims must be tested continuously against results.
The question facing Pakistan, therefore, is not whether it has policy consistency. It does. The more important question is whether it has the institutional capacity and political courage to abandon what keeps failing and adopt what works.
Unless our budgets break with the old habit of repeating failure, Pakistan’s demand for consistency will remain both valid and incomplete.
The writer is a former CEO of Unilever Pakistan and of the Pakistan Business Council.
