Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Different Decades
Pakistan’s economic record for the past fifty years is both impressive and disappointing.
Impressive Disappointing
• Economic growth rates and per capita • The potential for growth and
incomes have more than doubled development has not fully realized
despite a quadruple increase in relative to other countries at the same
population. stage in the early 1960s.
• Structural transformation has taken • Human development indicators have
place from a predominantly agrarian lagged far behind compared to other
economy to a more diversified Asian developing countries.
production structure. • Adult literacy rates, infant mortality
and life expectancy are much below
those justified by its per capita income
level.
• Monetary and fiscal policies have been
lax.
• Physical infrastructure, particularly
power and roads are not up to the mark
with the level of economic activity.
• Technological and scientific progress
has been limited despite the acquisition
of nuclear technology.
The Early Years
• At the end of WWII, decolonization and the movement toward independence
gathered momentum. Colonies liberated from colonial fetters and new nations
born.
• Pakistan, one of these nations, was born on 14 August 1947.
• The partitions of the Indian subcontinent created one country with two Wings,
West Pakistan and East Pakistan, divided by more than a thousand miles of Indian
territory.
• The complex task of nation-building required solid institutions, a functional
administration and a large cadre of technocrats and civil servants to formulate the
country’s economic policy.
• Pakistan started its history with a net outflow of human capital, as skilled Hindu
businessmen and technical workers migrated to India and without an
entrepreneurial class that could fuel the industrial expansion.
• The prospects for Pakistan were not promising. Many of the early years were spent
in the rehabilitation of refugees.
• However, the inward migration of 6.5 million Muslims brought an influx of workers
as well mas a critical group of able civil servants who helped administer the
country.
The Early Years
• One of the few positive features in Pakistan in 1947 was the substantial
irrigation network that had been developed during the heyday of British
rule and continuously expanded in the subsequent years.
• This system ensured that Pakistani agriculture would have a fertile
background for the transfer of new technologies and institutions. Given
the predominantly agrarian nature of the economy at Partition and the
large dependence of Pakistani agriculture on cotton, rice, jute and wheat
production, a viable irrigation system was a necessary input into the
production process.
• However, a critical deficiency of other infrastructure, i.e., roads, power,
railroads, was a serious constraint on development.
• By all token, Pakistan was an agrarian society with marginal trappings of
infrastructure.
The Early Years
• The mixed initial endowment of resources and rudimentary institutions
provided the critical background for Pakistan’s attempts at nation-building.