Industrial Development and Efficiency in Pakistan: A RevisionistOverview

Pakistan was widely hailed as a “model” of economic,especially industrial, development during the 1960s-see, for example,Papanek (1967). At the same time, the experience of Pakistan has been animportant part of the basis of the seminal critiques ofimport-substituting industrialization by Little, Scitovsky and Scott(LSS) in (1970) and by Balassa et al. (1971). Pakistan was one of eachof the sample of seven countries examined by LSS (1970) and by Balassaet ai. (1971), respectively. Indeed, within those samples, Pakistan wasrepresented as an extreme case of the sins of import-substituting or”inward-looking” industrialization. This “outlier” in the small samples,hence bore a large part of the burden of the “proofs” of LSS (1970) andBalassa et al. (1971) This paper first attempts an assessment of thesecontrasting views pertaining to the 1950s and 1960s. There has beenconsiderably less research on Pakistan’s industrialization since 1970.Thus, the discussion pertaining to this period is more speculative, andsome of the propositions tend to be more in the nature of hypothesesthan results of research.