Celebrating Five Years of Reason, Rigor & Research

TABLE OF CONTENT

Macroeconomy: Concurrent Issues and Reforms in Pakistan

• Doing Development Better by Muhammad Shaaf Najib
• REER as a Measure of Exchange Rate Misalignment by Hafsa Hina
• Export Subsidies and Import Substitution: Steering Mercantilism in the Modern Time by Uzma Zia
• Assessing Fiscal Resource Distribution in Pakistan- The NFC Awards by Iftikhar Ahmad
• A Case for Domestic Commerce-Led Growth by Omer Siddique
• The Import Substitution Policy and Strong Domestic Commerce: Case Study of Mobile Phones by Abid Rehman

Regulatory Burden & Sludge

• Sludge economy of Pakistan: A dynamic CGE-Sludge Framework by Muhammad Zeshan
• Stunted Seth-State Owned Companies by Anjeela Khurram
• Business Community Problems in Pakistan: An Overview by Farhat Mahmood
• Seth-owned, unlisted, non-corporatized stagnant enterprises of Pakistan: An Analysis of Growth Constraints and State of Professional Management of SUNSET Businesses of Pakistan
• The Paradox of Elite Capture: A Double-Edged Sword by Tehmina Assad

Opportunities and Digital Rights

• Opportunities, not “Relief”! by Durre Nayab
• Internet for All: A Vision and a Mission by Fizzah Khalid Butt
• Brain Drain in Pakistan: Analyzing Trend, Causes and Consequences by Henna Ahsan
• Transforming Education in Pakistan: PIDE’s Research Perspectives by Muhammad Jehangir Khan
• Analysis of Research and Development in Pakistan: An Alternative Approach by Ghulam Mustafa

Markets: Energy, Agriculture & Real Estate

• Energy Policy Directions: Seeking the Right Path by Afia Malik
• PIDE’s Vision on Environmental Issues: A Concise Overview by Sobia Rose
• Unlocking State Captured Real Estate by Azwar Muhammad Aslam
• Misunderstanding Markets: The Case for a Market-Friendly Government in Pakistan by Abbas Murtaza Maken
• PIDE’s Prescription for Better Agriculture in Pakistan by Muhammad Faisal and Abedullah

Cities as Engine of Growth

• Key Takeaways from Research on Cities by Lubna Hassan
• Hard vs Soft Infrastructure? Blue Print of Paradigm Shift by Saba Anwar
• Urban Engines or Elite Enclaves? A Reflection on PIDE’s Insights by Yasir Zada Khan and Haris Azeem
• Reshape Cities into Economic Machines by Saddam Hussein
• People versus Cars: Rethinking Pakistan’s Urban Mobility by Mohammad Shaaf Najib

Homage To Dr. Nadeem Ul Haque

Who is a leader? This question brings many answers and queries. Is a leader a person who leads by example or is he/she someone who takes charge to control and authorize? Does leading positions in the public sector bring an unquestionable adherence to power or can it be about inclusion, diversity, and equality of opportunity and opinions? These questions become even more complex when we consider them for a leadership position at a place that requires intellect, knowledge, and most importantly IDEAS!

PIDE, Pakistan’s oldest and leading public sector think tank, was fortunate to have such a leader for the last five years. One with rigour, radicality, criticality, and foresightedness- Nadeem Ul Haque.

Haque is the leader public sector organizations need and deserve. He not only leads by example, but he paths ways for the people to explore, invigorate, and even fly. He is inclusive in sociality and determined in professionality. He is radical in his thoughts and steadfast in his vision. He is quick to learn and easy to adapt. He expects to push the envelope after he pushes it himself. He has done things for the Institute no one else could imagine or dared to imagine. He is never subservient to the powerful…something that becomes a source of frequent annoyance in certain quarters. He is always unafraid. He questions. He critiques. And he is always ready to be questioned and critiqued. He reads to impart, he ideates to give, he questions to improve and happily takes a back seat to cheer for others. He is a legacy.  

When Haque joined PIDE in October 2019 as the Vice Chancellor, the Institute was struggling to align its research with the recurrent issues of Pakistan’s economy and public policy. He brought policy-informed research back to the institute’s agenda, and a radical shift not only in research but also in the outlook of the employees occurred. With engagement with the leading local and international academics, policymakers, politicians, and development practitioners, he developed PIDE’s research agenda siphoning into the power corridors through consistently engaging dialogue and debates. He envisioned PIDE’s research agenda, organized platforms to articulate it, developed teams to execute it and campaigned to disseminate it. Due to his amicability, malleability, and consistency, PIDE stands tall in policy-informed research with its thematic areas focusing on economic growth, cities and urban development, the energy sector, regulatory burden, demography, education and healthcare, law and economics, and public sector management.

He started many research projects on critical public policy issues, some of which have been incorporated into policymaking. His idea of Sludge and the Cost of Bureaucracy, intensely researched by his carefully constructed team, is being acknowledged both in policy circles and by the world’s leading academics, including the Nobel Laureates. His masterstroke of researching key policy-laden areas such as the evaluation of Pakistan’s regulatory authorities, estimating the cost of regulatory burden, and paid parking in Islamabad, to name a few, and conducting conferences, seminars and webinars to build academia-policymakers nexus is proven most fruitful.

The formats and platforms to develop and disseminate research during the last five years were diversified. These include innumerable books, the journal Pakistan Development Review, Knowledge Briefs, Policy Viewpoints, seminars/webinars, Discourse magazine, regional conferences, policy-dialogue moots, and the public’s economics festival, the EconFest.

Haque does not merely believe in producing research, he emphasizes marketing it, reverberating it, and spelling it out loud to academics and policymakers. For this, he engaged with youth, developed a media and outreach office, he hired young people in the institute; a freshness in thought which was lacking. Initiatives like the PIDE YouTube channel, documentaries, animated videos, podcasts, newspaper articles, and Twitter/X Spaces were all to take the Institute’s research to all kinds of audiences, including laymen.

Most of the linkages developed in the last five years, such as media-academia, industry-academia, and policymakers-academia are the result of his dream of building a thought community in Pakistan. Academic, policy and corporate research in Pakistan has remained constricted to the silos. The aim to make it intersectional and interactional has been materialized by Haque. He believes that without digging deep into the heartlands of the country, digging out rooted issues Pakistan’s economy is confronting, and becoming the intermediary between policymakers and the problems of the common person, change will never happen. With the same spirit, he took the Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists (PSDE) out of Islamabad, and into the country’s heartlands: Peshawar in 2021, Quetta in 2022 and Multan in 2023. Including these conferences, PIDE in totality, has organized conferences, consultative sessions, and seminars in 18 different geographical areas of Pakistan, including Malakand, Chitral, Gwadar and Gilgit Baltistan. These academic and policy networks have been developed with the provincial governments, development partners, universities, think tanks, foreign institutes and R&D reforms. Haque believes in building thought networks.

The most important initiative during his tenure to build a thought network in Pakistan is the Research for Social Transformation and Advancement (RASTA). This initiative with its eulogization of ‘Local Research, Local Solutions’ has turned into a slogan for research that is local, indigenous, and contextual. RASTA, now Pakistan’s largest economics and public policy research grants program, has established an extensive knowledge network and produced high-quality, evidence-based policy research. It has engaged 65+ Universities, 12 International Institutes, and 3,200⁺ researchers, academicians, and practitioners. A network like RASTA has been Haque’s dream for a long, and the last few years have led to its realization.

With Haque’s five-year tenure nearing completion, we, the staff of PIDE, pay our deepest homage to his contributions in creating and developing ideas and stressing the need for local thought and research in policymaking.  His impact on the Institute, and even the country, is much more than this write-up can ever do justice to. This book is just a small token of our appreciation and an acknowledgement of the ideas and the culture of debate you have germinated at the Institute. With its key thematic areas, covering Macroeconomy, Regulatory Burden, Opportunities, Cities as Engines of Growth and Markets, the book reverberates all the ideas you have spelt out over the last five years.

We want to THANK YOU for all you did for PIDE and for us!!
May your tribe grow. May you grow.
WE WILL MISS YOU.

Durre Nayab and Fahd Zulfiqar
(on behalf of the staff of PIDE)