Courtesy: "The News" (1 Sep 2012)
The PTI's Economic Vision
By Asad Umar
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf announced its five-year economic vision recently. There has been a varied response to it, but a recurring theme in many of the responses, including that in the editorial on the subject in The News, has been that the analysis of issues is spot-on but implementation-level details are insufficient. To quote from the editorial, “The PTI’s economic policy plan gets full marks for intention and vision.” High praise, indeed. It has never been lack of plans for detailed implementation which stops reform from happening. The roadblocks are lack of political will and unwillingness to take the entrenched vested interests head-on and compromises made for political expediency and self-interests. The second major hurdle is governance failure and weak institutions, and that causes even sincere efforts to fail. The economic vision of the PTI addresses each of these and takes a bold political stance on them.
The PTI’s economic vision is based on five national emergencies that have to be declared to deal with the core structural problems of Pakistan’s economy. The first is energy reform. The key elements of resolving the energy crises include changing the fuel mix, revamping the rundown low-efficiency generation and distribution system, fast-tracking new generation capacity and gas imports, incentivising exploration activity, developing the local coal reserves, harnessing the hydroelectric potential of the country, utilising its renewable energy potential and getting the regulatory and incentive structure right for the whole energy sector. Detailed work on most of these aspects has been done, and is underway in a couple of areas. Just the conversion of furnace-oil based capacity to coal would save approximately four billion dollars a year and we would be able to get rid of the circular debt crises by reducing the cost of power generation, instead of increasing tariffs. Recognising the importance of fixing the energy crises we have included 20 billion dollars of government investment in this sector in the five-year period. Private investment will be in addition to this.
