LocationsEvidence, Leadership, and the Right Moment
By Sajid Faiz Malik | Country Economist, International Growth Center, Pakistan
& Zuhair Khan | Country Economist, International Growth Center, Pakistan
Pakistan has rarely lacked reform blueprints. What has defeated successive governments is the harder task of turning well-understood intentions into reforms that actually take hold.
Pakistan does not lack diagnoses of its problems but lacks reforms that endure. Two recent examples - a national growth framework and analytical support to the tax authorities - suggest that turning evidence into reform depends on three things at once: rigorous analysis, political leadership genuinely open to data and evidence, and the judgement to act when the moment is right.
Pakistan's economy has long moved in cycles. A spell of growth builds up imbalances such as a widening current account, a stretched budget, and thinning reserves, until the country turns, once again, to the IMF to stabilize. Time and again, these fleeting spurts have been derailed before they could mature, and each stabilization has bought time rather than settled the weaknesses beneath it: a tax base among the narrowest in the world, low firm productivity, stagnant exports, and a young population entering the labour market faster than the economy can absorb it. None of this is for want of diagnosis. Pakistan has rarely lacked reform blueprints. What has defeated successive governments is the harder task of turning well-understood intentions into reforms that actually take hold.
Closing that gap is partly a matter of evidence. It is also a matter of who owns it. The International Growth Centre, based at the London School of Economics, has worked with Pakistan's federal, provincial, and local governments since 2010 on independent, demand-led research. But the model succeeds only to the extent that governments use the evidence as their own, not because an outside institution produced it. IGC does not seek credit for the reforms that follow. The credit, and the responsibility, belongs to the policymakers who open their own data to scrutiny and act on what it shows, even when inconvenient. Two examples show what that looks like in practice.
The first is the growth framework1 that we prepared in 2025 at the request of the Planning Commission, following a series of consultations with the Commission and its senior leadership. Rather than another list of desirable reforms, it places a single idea at its centre: export orientation. Pakistan has one of the fastest-growing young populations in South Asia, a pressure that becomes an opportunity only if the economy can lift firm productivity, create meaningful jobs, and compete in export markets. The framework's value lies as much in its origins as in its analysis: it answered a question the government was already asking, which gave the evidence a route into the state's own planning, and it has since informed how development partners frame their advice to the government. It was, in short, evidence designed to be used.
The second is reforms in taxation. Pakistan's fiscal fragility traces directly to a tax-to-GDP ratio that had long been among the lowest in the world, leaving little to fund development, with excessive dependence on borrowing (debt servicing now has the single largest claim on the budget). Here IGC’s contribution has been analytical: we have worked with the Federal Board of Revenue on strengthening enforcement, and provided analytical support to proposed tax measures which involve the unglamorous business of turning a broad intention to raise revenue more fairly into specific, workable steps. Work of this kind is only possible when the authorities are willing to open administrative data to outside analysis, and that willingness cannot be taken for granted. It reflects a deliberate choice by the economic leadership to let evidence, rather than assertion, shape revenue policy. It is a quiet but consequential form of openness, and deserves recognition.
What the growth framework and the tax reforms share is not their subject matter but their sponsorship. Both were brought to life by government demand, not pushed by outsiders who thought Pakistan needed them. That is why leadership matters beyond any single reform. Official framing has treated stabilization as a beginning, not an end. The task now is to move from stability to growth. That framing keeps attention on the structural reforms that outlast a budget cycle. So does a delivery unit that tracks reform commitments across ministries against measurable targets.
None of this guarantees success. Political will can waver, and windows close as quickly as they open. But three things create the environment in which evidence-based reform takes root: leadership willing to be guided by data, an economic team focused on sustainable growth rather than only the next quarter, and machinery built to follow through.
The lesson of both examples is the same. Rigorous evidence, a government genuinely open to it, and the judgement to act at the right moment are not three separate things but one connected discipline. Pakistan does not lack diagnoses; it lacks reforms that survive the moment they are proposed. Stabilization has, once more, bought the country time. Whether that time yields durable growth will depend on how well we convert evidence into reform and, no less, on whether the openness to data and the appetite for delivery now visible at the top are sustained long enough to see the harder reforms through.
1. https://www.theigc.org/publications/framework-productivity-and-export-led-growth-pakistan