Former President of the Islamabad Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry (IWCCI), Farida Rashid, said on Thursday that we have wasted a lot of time, and now the rapid execution of reforms is essential to Pakistan’s continued existence.
Following the IMF’s approval of the loan, Finance Minister Mohammad Aurangzeb has made it very clear how important it is to implement structural reforms to improve the situation quickly, she said.
She added that Pakistan has a huge public sector, a huge debt load, falling human development indicators, and an environment that doesn’t encourage investment or growth because of years of inadequate management, lack of fiscal discipline, political instability, corruption, and giving in to the greedy elite.
Businesswoman Farida Rashid, who was recently elected to the executive committee of the IWCCI, said that Pakistan needs to change its development model because it is based on the government getting involved in everything, resulting in heavy losses.
She noted that a small group of political, landed, and business elites have been able to take advantage by implementing protectionist policies and receiving special treatment through subsidies and lower taxes, which has damaged the economy greatly.
While the majority of the population has to deal with an unsustainable economic burden, the country is becoming more vulnerable to shocks like natural disasters, which have destroyed communities and infrastructure worth billions of rupees and killed thousands of people, she added.
According to Farida Rashid, one of the main economic problems is that government spending keeps increasing. The public sector exhibits a culture of waste, squandering large amounts of money on unnecessary activities, and government offices consistently exceed their budgets by spending money they don’t need.
Furthermore, numerous federal and provincial offices and ministries performing comparable tasks result in significant resource wastage. Even though the 18th Amendment gave the provinces much power and responsibility, many central ministries and departments are still in use, even if they aren’t needed.
Even though people at the top are becoming more aware of what’s wrong with the economy and foreign lenders are advising on how to fix it, there is still much-delayed action to change how the economy works completely.
The federal cabinet decided in August to eliminate about 150,000 open jobs in ministries, divisions, and departments as part of the government’s rightsizing program. Still, our notorious bureaucracy is reluctant to allow this.
The real reasons for our steady economic decline are a government that doesn’t work well together and policies favouring the wealthy in areas like taxes and investments.
She observed that if leaders want to raise the standard of living for the average Pakistani and improve the economy, they need to completely change how the economy works.
They can do this by reducing wasteful government spending, making taxes fairer, and boosting programs for social welfare and human development. Pakistan can only hope to give its people a good future if it takes strong action in these areas.
