Inaugural Address (PDR Vol. 23 No.2 & 3-1984)

Mr. Chairman, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure to inaugurate the First Annual General Meeting of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists. Based in the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, the Society is intended to play a key role in disseminating information on pressing economic problems and in providing a permanent forum for a free and dispassionate exchange of ideas among professional economists and policy-makers. I am confident that the Society will set in motion a process of interplay between the ideas produced by the economists and the pragmatic application of these ideas by the policy-makers in the world of reality, thereby engendering efficiently functioning models of growth and development. Economics is a living and practical science which must draw its inspiration from and determine the parameters of its theories on the basis of actual organisation of economic life around us and the nature of economic problems faced at a particular stage of development. Theories and models, in turn, must stand the test of practical application in the market-place. A dialogue between the economists and the policy-makers, if they have to be at all placed into separate categories as a part of product discrimination, would represent the most desirable synthesis of professional energy, and for such a dialogue this Society, I am sure, will provide an ideal forum.