Growth and Structural Change in Pakistan’s Manufacturing Industry : A Comment

The Lewis and Soligo article [1] includes an estimate of the growth of all “large scale” industry followed by an analysis of the growth rates of the major industry groups: consumer goods, intermediate products, investment and related goods. These two parts of the article are not dependent on each other and the very interesting and excellent analysis of the differential growth rates of the subsectors would not be affected by bias in the overall growth estimates. Some questions can be raised about both parts of the article. Estimates of value added and rate of growth of large scale industry are of considerable importance to analyses of the Pakistan economy. Lewis and Soligo’s estimate of the level of value added and its rate of growth is considerably higher than those of the Census of Manufacturing Industry (CMI), the National Accounts, and my own [2].