The need to do more

"Pakistan's telecom industry is the one success story, which is the second fastest growing industry in the world after China," Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said the other day while laying the foundation stone of the Federal capital's tallest building, a telecom tower.
This particular claim about being second only to China may not be wholly right, but there is no denying that the present government has taken important steps to encourage investment with its policy of privatisation and liberalisation.
The telecom sector, in fact, is a good example of how the process of privatisation and liberalisation can changes things to the benefit of investors and consumers both. As Aziz pointed out, at present, there are six private companies operating in the field of cellular phones, and the competition has led to low consumer rates and high quality of service.
This is in contrast with the past when successive governments treated public sector enterprises as employment exchanges to induct their respective political supporters. Resultantly, the operational costs of various public sector entities kept rising to unmanageable levels while such inductees felt no particular compulsion to work at high efficiency standards.
Nonetheless, the present government policy alone is not enough to create an enabling environment for fresh investments, especially foreign direct investment (FDI). In spite of all the policy measures, during the last couple of years, it has come in at the annual rate of less than one billion dollars - the government claims of Pakistan's being the second fastest growing economy notwithstanding.
Investors still find it frustrating to deal with, aside from political uncertainties, bureaucratic red tape and obstacles, fraudulent practices in land sales, and a painfully slow moving legal system.
The President's Investment Initiative, soon to be launched is aimed to address all these problems, which have defied solution all these years. Yet it may not be easy for the government to address all these problems in a hurry.
But it can and must do something about deceit in the commercial land deals and put in place an efficacious legal mechanism for dispute resolution under the President's Investment Initiative. Then there is also the problem of high cost of doing business in this country.
As we have been pointing out in these columns on earlier occasions, the prices of the three basic inputs of water, power and transportation are some of the highest in the world, which makes it hard for the local businesses to vie for markets with their foreign competitors. And of course, the cost factor also discourages FDI.
It is about time the government looked at these issues with a resolve to take quick remedial action. Notably, the one cheap factor of production in this country is labour. And, as the Prime Minister mentioned, during his interactions with the business people, all entrepreneurs have been underlining the lack of skilled and duly qualified manpower as a big challenge. He disclosed that the government is soon going to introduce a crash programme to bridge the huge gap between required and available skilled manpower, which, according to him, is the outcome of neglect of the past ten years.
The problem, unfortunately, is much older than that. Education and health care, a primary responsibility of governments even in the developed countries, have never received the priority they deserved. It indeed is a matter of satisfaction that the government has finally decided to enhance the skills of the workforce through a broad-based education and training programme.
Presumably, it also realises that healthy workers are linked with higher productivity. So even if its consideration behind a proposed crash programme for skill enhancement is investor pressure, it is still to be appreciated.