Director SIA. Formerly VC PIDE+ Deputy Chairman Planning Commission IMF. Designed/created RASTA social science research funding network. Researcher author
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Nadeem Haque
Education without learning
Pakistan’s education crisis is usually described as a crisis of funding, access, teacher shortages and poor learning outcomes. These problems are real, but they do not explain the whole failure. Pakistan also has an education system that is over-regulated, politically controlled and administratively fragmented.
A housing policy that forgot the questions—I
Pakistan’s new housing policy never asks what the state should do in housing, or why our cities cannot grow up. The National Housing Policy 2026, issued by the Ministry of Housing and Works in August, runs to ninety pages contains fluent donor speak: climate resilience, inclusion, public-private partnership. What it lacks is the clarity of concept.
Pakistan’s 25th IMF Programme: Why Is The Press Still Celebrating?
Washington delivered two verdicts on Pakistan this week. On October 8 the IMF announced a staff-level agreement worth about $1.21 billion. A day earlier the World Bank reported that poverty at $3 a day had risen 6.4 percentage points between 2018–19 and 2024–25. One said the economy was stabilizing. The other said its people were getting poorer. Every paper ran both. None ran them together. That is the week in one sentence. The news pages transcribed, the opinion pages diagnosed, and the two never met.
The dollars come home. Pakistan’s future leaves.
Every new remittance record is celebrated as proof of Pakistan’s resilience. It should instead make us uneasy. Pakistan received a record USD 41.6 billion in workers’ remittances in FY2025–26, up 8.6 percent from the previous year, according to the State Bank of Pakistan. The dollars are real and essential to many households.
Twenty-Five IMF Programs Later, Pakistan Still Has The Same Economy
Pakistan has stabilized its accounts, not its economy. Last week FBR beat its quarterly target, reserves stayed above $21bn, the debt ratio fell and the IMF review opened without drama. That same week public debt touched Rs86.7tr, gross financing needs neared a fifth of GDP, inflation stayed above 10pc and investment held back. A Gulf oil and LNG shock set the outlook, and cabinet committees decided who could import LNG, export sugar or get fuel relief.
The sovereign-bank nexus and its pitfalls
Every few days there is a lament in newspapers and on TV that the cash economy must be killed, and that Pakistanis hold more cash than desired. There is a part of the cash story that gets remarkably little attention: Pakistan has spent decades protecting and feeding banks while doing far too little to develop finance. The distinction matters. Banking is not the same thing as financial development.
K-Electric tariff reversal weakens Pakistan’s privatisation case
Karachi’s consumers are being asked to celebrate a tariff cut they may never see. NEPRA has reduced K-Electric’s allowed average base tariff from Rs39.97 to Rs32.37 per unit — a reduction of Rs7.60. But KE’s households and factories are billed under Pakistan’s uniform consumer tariff policy, so their monthly bills do not automatically fall by the same amount. The state may book a fiscal saving. Karachi may be left with a weaker electricity service.
Pakistan has made tax compliance a competitive disadvantage
Every budget season, Pakistan returns to the same ritual: how much did the Federal Board of Revenue collect? If there is a shortfall, another tax package follows. If the number rises, it is presented as reform. Those of us who deal with the system know this is misleading. A government can collect more and still leave factories weaker, exports less competitive and ordinary households poorer. The question should not be whether the state can take more.
Banks-based economy not a growth economy
Two pieces recently framed a debate worth settling. Shahid Kardar, in Dawn (“Bank domination”), showed that Pakistan’s financial system is bank-dominated by structure, not accident. Zafar Masud, in Profit (“Same Banks, Different Field”), argued that once you adjust for Pakistan’s cash economy, informality, and fiscal deficit, the region’s private-credit gap all but disappears — banks, he says, lend at “almost exactly the rate anyone else would” on the field they’ve been given.
Privatization without institutions is a change of letterhead
Private ownership can improve incentives, but it cannot rescue a sector governed by opaque subsidies, weak regulation, disputed data and a non-competitive market. Pakistan must redesign the institution and the transaction together—or risk turning privatization into another guarantee-backed public liability.
Press Review: Reading The Economy
There are two ways Pakistan's economic press keeps failing itself, and honestly they come from the same place. One is stenography just typing up whatever the state or a donor hands out. An announcement, a package, an MoU, a rating. Nobody stops to ask if anything actually changed underneath it. The other is siloing. A columnist can be genuinely sharp inside his own beat and still never connect banking to the fiscal deficit, or the fiscal deficit to the way we do development through projects.
Pakistan needs cities that grow, not provinces that govern
Pakistan’s administrative reform debate begins from the wrong premise. We keep asking how many provinces the country should have, when the more urgent question is why its cities—the places where people, firms, capital and ideas actually converge—are not allowed to govern themselves. The demand for new provinces is understandable: existing provinces are large, centralised and unequal, and provincial capitals often dominate resources while other cities retain little control over even local matters.
Colonial mindset
Pakistan has been independent for nearly eight decades. The Union Jack came down, the British went home, and we acquired our own flag, parliament, bureaucracy, courts and constitution. But independence leaves a harder question: did the colonial state really disappear, or did we simply learn to operate it ourselves?
Weekly Review Of Pakistan's Economics Journalism And Commentary: August 7–14, 2026
An interesting week for journalism as newspapers collectively revealed an important shift in the way the economy is being discussed. As I have noted in previous reviews, economic reporting has largely revolved around the daily cycle of announcements: another IMF review, another export target, another meeting of the ECC, another increase in petroleum prices, another promise of investment, another privatization plan. Journalism has remained an extension of official press releases.
Inflation and the cost of an unreformed state
Pakistan’s inflation problem has returned just as the government wants the public to believe that macroeconomic stability has been restored. CPI inflation was 11.1 percent year-on-year in June 2026, slightly below May’s 11.7 percent, but far above the 3.2 percent recorded in June 2025. Inflation has moved from 5.8 percent in January to 7.0 percent in February, 7.3 percent in March, 10.9 percent in April, 11.7 percent in May and 11.1 percent in June.
Economic Journalism Still Reports The Symptoms, Not The System: August 1-7
Pakistan’s economic journalism had a better week than usual, with stories on exports, food insecurity, energy pricing, Islamic finance, agricultural subsidies, jobs and federalism that moved beyond simple press-release reporting, while the op-eds were sharper. Yet the larger problem remains. Our economic press still reports symptoms more easily than it investigates systems.
Deemed duty: Pakistan’s hidden tax on fuel consumers
Pakistan’s petroleum pricing system has many visible burdens: petroleum levy, margins, freight, exchange-rate pass-through and government adjustments. But one of the most revealing is the least understood: deemed duty. It is a charge that consumers pay without seeing it, a subsidy that government does not budget transparently, and a protection that refineries have treated for too long as an entitlement. Deemed duty is not an ordinary customs duty. It is not paid at the border.
Weekly Pakistan Economics Newspaper Review Friday, July 17–Friday, July 24, 2026
1. Economic journalism under review Journalism: releases reported, systems left unexplored The current-account story got the arithmetic right and resisted premature celebration: record remittances still left a $139m deficit because imports rose while exports sat near $30bn. But the reporting kept remittances, exports and imports as three separate facts rather than one sentence: Pakistan is financing weak domestic productivity by exporting labour.
CTBCM: Pakistan cannot build a market while preventing competition
Pakistan’s electricity sector is once again being presented with a reform that sounds transformative but risks becoming largely cosmetic. The Competitive Trading Bilateral Contract Market (CTBCM) is being promoted as the beginning of a competitive electricity market. Yet the architecture being put in place remains fundamentally incompatible with the operation of a genuine market. The central problem is simple.
Folly of chasing exchange rate
PAKISTAN’S economic debate is trapped in outdated vocabulary. Each time the rupee weakens, headlines scream ‘devaluation’. Anchors ask whether one is imminent, while policymakers debate whether the exchange rate should be defended or strengthened. as if it was simply another policy tool. It’s not. The language belongs to another era. Today, most countries let their currencies move more freely.
CPEC miscalculation: how Pakistan built infrastructure but missed development
The debate surrounding the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has become trapped between two extremes. One side portrays it as a transformational success that modernized Pakistan’s infrastructure. The other treats it as the source of many of the country’s current economic difficulties. Both perspectives miss the larger lesson. The real story of CPEC is not about China, nor is it primarily about debt.
Pakistan’s Empty Stadiums And The Missing Jobs Economy
Jobs economy is hiding in plain sight, locked behind gates, guarded by officials, and used occasionally for cricket, political rallies, convocations or ceremonies. Pakistan is searching for jobs in all the usual places: industry, exports, agriculture, IT, construction, remittances, government schemes, donor projects and PSDP pipelines. Pakistan has stadiums built by the PSDP by politicians who want to show . It has expo centers. It has convention halls. It has youth. It has cities.
Reading The Economy: A Weekly Review Of Economic Journalism And Commentary
Every week this column finds the same two diseases. The news pages practise stenography: officials speak, reporters transcribe. The opinion pages write in silos: each op-ed diagnoses one fragment, cites no local research, and waits for a donor report to set the agenda. This week supplied textbook cases of both — and, as always, the question neither side asks: what are Pakistan's real economic issues? The week in news The data was plentiful.
Annual Plan defeatism
Every year Pakistan publishes an Annual Plan with growth targets, sectoral targets, investment targets, export targets, and a Public Sector Development Programme. Last 4 annual plans targeted a growth rate of about 4 percent and exports of about 8 percent of GDP—a lackluster economy at best! Where do these numbers come from? Should they be taken seriously? Where do the targets come from? Not really — except for a day of newspaper reporting and commentary by old-fashioned economists.
Inherited democracy and closed political market
Pakistan’s dynastic politics is usually treated as a moral failure. We complain that fathers hand seats to sons, daughters inherit constituencies, brothers rotate offices, and families dominate assemblies generation after generation. This is true, but incomplete. Dynasties persist not only because political families are ambitious. They persist because Pakistan has built a political market that rewards inheritance and punishes outsiders. In economics, closed markets protect incumbents.
Public narrative vs silent reality
EVERY two months, the State Bank of Pakistan announces an interest rate. The announcement is treated as serious economic medicine. Hiking of the rate is presented as a fight against inflation and cuts as a spur to growth. Either way, the public narrative is the same: adults are managing the fragile economy with a sophisticated tool. What rarely gets mentioned is the trillions of rupees the SBP, quietly and regularly, pumps directly into the banking system with no public scrutiny or debate.
Pakistan has equity appetite; its owners have control anxiety
Pakistan keeps saying it has no capital. Firms complain that bank borrowing is expensive. Government complains that private investment is weak. Economists complain that debt dominates finance. Yet whenever a credible company comes to the stock market, investors appear. So let us stop pretending the problem is only lack of capital. The market has appetite. What it does not have is enough supply.
Pakistan needs equity markets, not dynastic control
Pakistan’s problem is not only that the state owns too much. It is also that too many productive assets remain trapped in dynastic control, protected ownership structures and closed corporate networks. The economy needs a deeper equity market in which businesses are valued continuously, ownership can be contested, capital can move, managers can be judged by performance, and firms are not treated as family estates.
Pakistan cannot tax its future to pay for its energy past
Legacy energy liabilities must be separated from current consumption tariffs if Pakistan wants affordable power, industrial competitiveness, and a real market. Pakistan’s energy problem is no longer just about supply. It is about the accumulated cost of years of bad policy, weak governance, distorted pricing, and delayed reform. That overhang now sits like a dead weight on the entire system.
End the budget ‘circus’
Pakistan has turned the budget into an annual suspense drama. Businesses wait. Markets speculate. Consultants guess. Television studios ask who will be taxed, spared, punished or rewarded. For weeks, the economy pauses to read signals from Islamabad. This is not how a serious economy should run. A budget should not be the annual moment when government reinvents economic policy.
Privatization must create markets, not new oligarchs
Pakistan does need privatization. But privatization is not reform merely because ownership moves from the public sector to the private sector. The real question is whether the sale creates competitive markets, wider ownership, professional management, investment, consumer welfare and hard budget discipline. If it does not, privatization becomes plunder with paperwork. International experience is clear. Privatization works when it is part of market creation.
Pakistan’s ‘fake’ search committees
Pakistan today suffers from a quiet but devastating institutional fraud. We pretend to conduct global-style “searches” for leadership positions while actually running hurried bureaucratic interview exercises. Every few months newspapers announce the formation of a “search committee” for a vice chancellor, regulator, public-sector CEO, or commission chairman. The language sounds modern and meritocratic.
Pakistan cannot reform power tariffs without breaking up the DISCOs
Uniform national tariffs hide failure, destroy incentives, and make privatisation harder. But tariff reform will also fail unless the distribution companies are dismantled into real wires businesses and separable power purchase and supply functions. Pakistan’s power tariff system has become a monument to confusion. It tries to do too many things at once and does most of them badly.
Advocating for the creation of a new ‘Growth Commission’
Pakistan’s economy continues to grapple with deep structural challenges, from stagnant productivity and ballooning public debt to inefficient resource allocation that fails to deliver meaningful growth or improved living standards for its citizens. At the heart of these persistent issues lies an institution that has outlived its usefulness: the Planning Commission, now operating under the Planning Division.
‘Mirage’ of PSX: Why a rising index does not equal recovery?
Pakistan loves a good headline, and few headlines are more seductive than a stock market touching new highs. A rising index is quickly presented as proof that the economy is healing, investors are returning, confidence has revived, and the country has finally turned a corner. It is a convenient story. It is also a dangerous one. The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) may be rising, but a rising index in a shallow, concentrated, and heavily influenced market is not the same thing as recovery.
Time to swap borrowing for equity
EVERY time interest rates rise in Pakistan, a familiar chorus emerges from industrial lobbies, chambers of commerce and TV experts: investment will collapse, industry will die, and growth will disappear unless the State Bank immediately cuts rates ‘in the national interest’. The argument is presented as self-evident. Cheap loans equal growth. At first, this sounds reasonable. Businesses need money to build factories, buy machines, and expand.
Why selling Pakistan’s better DISCOs?
Privatisation without tariff truth, asset ring-fencing, and a competent regulator risks turning reform into selective extraction. At first glance, selling Pakistan’s better-performing distribution companies lock, stock and barrel sounds sensible. If privatisation is the goal, why not begin with the cleaner utilities, attract stronger bidders, and show that reform is finally moving? In a country tired of state-owned inefficiency, that argument carries obvious appeal.
Pakistan’s greatest risk in ME crisis is social, not merely economic
Pakistan is no longer watching the Middle East crisis from a safe distance. Its effects are already here — in petrol pumps, electricity bills, grocery shops, and the strained faces of families trying to make shrinking incomes stretch across rising costs. For many households and businesses, recession is not a looming threat. It is a lived reality. Officials and markets instinctively worry about the balance of payments: oil imports, reserves, and the rupee. Those matter.
Pakistan’s gas upstream crisis
Pakistan’s gas crisis is usually narrated as a story of depletion. Fields matured, reservoirs declined, demand rose, LNG entered the system, and circular debt followed. That story is not false, but it is dangerously incomplete. The deeper failure is not geology. It is credibility. Pakistan once created an upstream gas policy that worked. It made exploration commercially intelligible, attracted foreign expertise, widened the technical base of the sector, and helped domestic production rise sharply.
Pakistan mispriced gas and mispriced its future
Pakistan did not merely misprice gas. It mispriced its own future. For decades, the country treated natural gas not as a scarce national asset requiring disciplined allocation, but as a politically convenient entitlement to be distributed cheaply and broadly. The result was a widening distortion between gas and competing fuels, especially fuel oil, electricity, and later imported LNG.
Pakistan’s power crisis also transmission crisis
Unless the grid is strengthened urgently, cheaper electricity will remain stranded, costly generation will keep being dispatched, and load-shedding will continue to haunt a country that already has enough capacity on paper. Pakistan’s electricity debate is obsessed with generation. Every few months, the conversation returns to fuel prices, capacity payments, circular debt, and which power plant should or should not have been built. All of that matters.
Rethinking black money
IN Pakistan, ‘black money’ is frequently mentioned as a problem that must be eliminated. Politicians, officials and talk shows describe it as money that is illegal, untaxed or linked to crime. However, this way of thinking is too simple and hides the real issue. When very different kinds of money are grouped together, it leads to poor policies. These policies create confusion, unfair treatment, and slow economic growth.
Narrative of large tax gap
PAKISTAN’S fiscal debate has settled into a familiar rhythm. The World Bank, IMF, tax consultants and commentators frequently assert that the country suffers from a ‘tax gap’ of seven to nine per cent of GDP — a shortfall between what is collected and what the law, ideally enforced, would yield. The metric implies that this shortfall is a result of cheating taxpayers.
Why the poor reject education
CONTRARY to popular perception Pakistan’s education crisis is not a core problem of access. It is a problem of incentives. Until that reality is grasped, the system will continue to expand without delivering either learning or opportunity. The dominant narrative, shaped by well-meaning experts and echoed by commentators, is simplistic, intellectually lazy and politically convenient. Its prescriptions are predictable: build more schools, expand universities, pour in more public money.
Innovation is not a policy but a system
Mehran Gul’s The New Geography of Innovation makes a compelling and timely argument: innovation is no longer the monopoly of Silicon Valley. It is spreading—across China, Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and beyond—into diverse institutional settings that are producing globally competitive firms. But the real value of the book lies not in mapping where innovation is happening. It lies in explaining why it happens—and, by implication, why it does not. Gul’s central insight is deceptively simple.
Managing Lahore’s balance sheet
A COMMON refrain among critics and residents of other Punjab cities is that Lahore has been unduly pampered by successive provincial governments. Substantial provincial transfers, it is argued, have financed its infrastructure and socioeconomic services at the expense of other jurisdictions. The reality, however, is more sobering. Lahore does not need such supposed favours.
Exiting IMF: change incentives
IN our article of Jan 28, 2026, we had highlighted the importance of fixing energy and the tax regime, both major constraints on our growth potential, for Pakistan to break its dependence on the IMF. Now we turn to other parts of the economy obstructing progress on the same goal. A structural issue responsible for perpetuating Pakistan’s dependence on the IMF is its failure to control expenditure.
Our ‘Groundhog Day’ policies
Pakistan’s economic failure is often described as a failure to liberalize, to export, or to industrialize properly. These explanations miss the deeper continuity. The problem is not that reform did not happen. The problem is that reform keeps reproducing the same incentives, decade after decade. Pakistan’s political economy is stuck in a policy version of Groundhog Day—every morning begins with new slogans, but the same inward-looking outcomes. Import substitution was only the opening act.
IGC Growth Week 2010 - Domestic Resource Mobilisation and Growth
Wednesday 22 September 2010 | 1 hour 32 minutes 32 seconds To reduce reliance on foreign aid and financial inflows, policymakers across the developing world are seeking to improve domestic resource mobilisation. But doing so effectively and efficiently presents a huge policy challenge. More is at stake, however, than just revenue raising to fund socially valuable investments. Effective fiscal systems are a core element of state building and a barometer of state legitimacy and effectiveness.
Understanding Pakistan’s SOE problem
Once the illusion is stripped away, Pakistan’s SOE problem becomes remarkably simple. The country does not suffer from an absence of reform ideas, governance laws, or diagnostic reports. It suffers from an unwillingness to assign and enforce `responsibility on those who already exercise power. Accountability, in this context, does not mean witch-hunts or criminalization of policy failure. It means aligning authority with consequences.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Nadeem
Contact Nadeem, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack