Inaugural Address – 1988

Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi, Dr Ghaffar Chaudhry, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is my privilege to inaugurate the Fifth Annual General Meeting of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists. During the past six years of its existence the Society, which I founded in 1982, has become an institution devoted to the pursuit of scientific virtuosity and academic rectitude. It has provided a powerful medium through which a serious discussion of economic and demographic issues related to Pakistan’s economy has become possible. I am happy to know that by this time over one hundred papers, written by scholars from all over the world, have been presented in this forum. In addition, the Inaugural Address, the Presidential Address, the Quaid-i-Azam Lectures, and the Guest Lectures, presented in this forum each year, provide a synoptic review of the fields of development economics and demography, and of issues relating to the economics of education, health and the role of women in the development process. This massive intellectual output should strengthen the process of knowledge creation by matching the theories of economic development with the ‘reality’ in the developing countries. The resulting literature, with a focus on Pakistan, also provides rich source material and guidelines for policy formulation in the field of socio-economic development. I must add, however, that while due to the contributions of the Society we know much more about the nature of the development problem, our knowledge of how to solve it has probably not expanded as much.