Pakistani governments, like their counterparts across the globe, do engage in data manipulation for political reasons. This tendency by politicians is perhaps best reflected in the proverb 'lies, damned lies and statistics'.
This proverb was popularized by the legendary write Mark Twain who in his Chapters From My Autobiography published in 1906 claimed that he was quoting from Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minster from 1874-1880: "Figures often beguile me particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" Ironically, this is missing from any of Disraeli's works and historians claim that the proverb was cited well after his death.
The American Dialect Society archives some notables who used this phrase or a version of it: (i) Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911), a writer, used it without attribution twice in October 1891; (ii) Giffen, Bagehot's assistant editor at The Economist, stated in 1892: "an old jest runs to the effect that there are three degrees of comparison among liars. There are liars, there are outrageous liars, and there are scientific experts. This has lately been adapted to throw dirt upon statistics. There are three degrees of comparison it is said, in lying. There are lies, there are outrageous lies, and there are statistics;" (iii) In the Nature publication, dated November 26, 1885: a well-known lawyer, who later became a judge, "once grouped witnesses into three classes: simple liars, damned liars, and experts. He did not mean that the expert uttered things which he knew to be untrue, but that by the emphasis which he laid on certain statements, and by what has been defined as a highly cultivated faculty of evasion, the effect was actually worse than if he had"; and finally (iv) a minute of the X club meeting held on 5 December 1885, recorded by Huxley and quoted in 1900 in his book, noted: "talked politics, scandal, and the three classes of witnesses-liars, d-d liars, and experts."
What are the lessons that we can learn from the history of this much-used proverb? Reliance on flawed data to formulate policies/strategies accounts for flawed policies/strategies which in turn may indicate why the Pakistan economy remains at the cusp of developmental take-off stage, a political speak for self praise by members of the executive, but never quite achieves it. Statistics continue to be used by our politicians to strengthen a claim based on what is being touted to the public as empirical proof; however politicians must understand one basic tenet of data manipulation: its credibility is limited to a narrow range and any attempt to flout the range would fuel deniability by independent experts.
Data manipulation by the Pakistani governments, past and present, (particularly our finance ministers, again past and present) is not an activity that is shunned by their counterparts in the world; take the case of Modi's India: he changed the methodology for calculating economic growth accounting for a growth of 7.9 percent - a change that was criticized by the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan. This approach brings to mind manipulation by Dr Hafeez Sheikh, an economist by education and experience, who changed the weightage of food as a component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which lowered the rate of inflation.
Unfortunately though data manipulation carried out by the last three Pakistani governments have been easily challengeable based on three disturbing elements: (i) it is fairly easy to spot as the so called experts engage in it without employing any finesse, an example being the failure of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) to rationalize its data with other government data and credible industrial sources; (ii) manipulation is grossly overstated and therefore defies logic for example the GDP growth rate in recent years; and (iii) there is no one heading any constitutionally autonomous body and/or any other government body that releases data who has the courage to stand up and challenge the obviously doctored data. Our "scientific experts" appointed by members of the executive engage in and/or support data manipulation rather unscientifically.
Credible reports during the tenure of Shaukat Aziz, a former Prime Minister who kept the finance portfolio, indicate that he was no 'expert' and simply changed an indicator that may have prompted criticism of his handling of the economy - and the corresponding indicators that supported it were left to the bureau of statistics to rationalize. Be that as it may, he also routinely criticized his predecessor Ishaq Dar for data manipulation - a charge that was returned with interest by Dar when he took over the portfolio for a short time in 2008 when PML-N and PPPP formed a coalition government.
Dr Hafeez Sheikh was angered in 2010, when he was seeking a tranche release from the Fund, by the adoption of 2005-06 as the base year, when foreign inflows were high in the aftermath of 9/11 instead of 1999 which was a particularly bad growth year as Pakistan was an international pariah at the time after Musharraf's military coup. Dr Sheikh urged the National Accounts Committee to "review this year's provisional growth figure of 3.2 percent", which was below the revised target. The then Statistics Secretary PBS under the administrative control of the Finance Minister quickly extended his support by stating publicly that "the NAC has overlooked some aspects while approving the gross domestic product (GDP) figure and it will be tabled before the governing council of PBS for review." In a statement that accepted responsibility, an uncommon admission by our cabinet members past and present, Dr Hafeez Sheikh stated "it was my negligence that I took the rebasing of national accounts to the National Accounts Committee (NAC) meeting without approval of the governing council and now I stand ready to face consequences." There were no consequences for either not being aware of the six-year-old exercise by the PBS data gathering machinery to change the base year nor indeed to keep 1999 as the base year - a year that was really not representative of the country's growth. Ishaq Dar's data manipulation is more akin to Shaukat Aziz's or very blatant and beyond the range of credibility which is why he is being challenged mercilessly by independent experts - though to no avail.
To conclude, our finance ministers for the past decade and a half at least have engaged in considerable data manipulation that has disabled them from taking informed decisions; unfortunately, one would be compelled to maintain that as long as lack of data integrity has little relevance on the vote bank there would be no attempt to desist from manipulating data.