The budget season is in full swing. High level seminars, conferences, behind the scenes lobbying, and advocacy efforts are making headlines every day. The electronic media too is busy giving their anchors a crash course training lesson for TV shows on budget and economy, where the most popular question would be: is this budget people friendly? As if that matters. Here is what matters instead. The budget is not supposed to be the most important element of any decent economy. Policy and governance is. The budget is only supposed to reflect the balancing of government accounts where revenue and expenditure items ought to reflect the policy direction of the government. The unfortunate reality is that public reasoning and conversations on policy are wanting, whereas that on fixing the governance cogs of federal and provincial state machinery does not exist.
Most policies are made without consultation with the stakeholders. If and when consultations are done, say by way of roundtables, they are not managed properly. Not only such roundtables are one-off events, a formality of ticking the box, they are also not adequately representative.
Nor are there discussions on electronic media, (even though watching TV is a national past time) because the media houses lack incentives to feature such discourse. Readers are encouraged to ask their family, friends and co-workers, if they saw debates and discussions on TV, or if they were a part of any academic or civil society moot, on say aviation policy, agriculture policies, population control, citizen right to information, or the duties of local, provincial, and federal governments on various affairs that affect the lives of citizens.
In fact, as former Planning Commission boss Nadeem-ul-Haq rightly said in a recent conversation with BR Research, there are no debates or conversations. The vast majority of consultant economists and corporate leaders are talking among themselves, where highlighting the same old problems over and over again consumes most of the so-called ‘discourse’.
The debate over various solutions is also wanting, if any. For instance, everyone says education problem should be fixed, and flags various indicators that show Pakistan’s poor performance in education. But are there heated debates – even in policy circles – over various number of pathways or solutions to the education problem, and implications of each of those policy choices. No! Life goes about ad-hoc.
As for the governance, the reform thinking seems to have been hijacked by Doing Business and other such fancy indicators. Some ‘geniuses’ therefore, only try to fix those indicators, mostly on donor funding, instead of fixing the whole governance machinery.
Over and over again, in each of the seminars and newspaper articles/TV shows, university talks etcetera, ‘weak, corrupt and inefficient’ bureaucracy features as the most cited problem. Yet neither the business chambers, nor the donors, nor the government, nor any other so-called champion of reforms have made civil service reforms as a single biggest agenda item.
No matter how much money one puts into the system and how many creative policy tools are crafted, if the government machinery – that is supposed to use those funds and policy tools – is weak, corrupt, inefficient and perversely incentivized, the impact of that funding and policy will remain limited. Which is also why the budget unfortunately remains the single biggest talked about event about economy every year, because of the ad-hoc fiscal incentives that are doled out to direct the economy in the absence of effective holistic policies.
And that’s just bad luck for citizens. Because for instance the budget this year will likely be ‘people friendly’ but the economic policies and governance of federal and provincial governments will continue to be ‘people unfriendly’. Howzat!
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