Pakistan’s economic journalism had a better week than usual, with stories on exports, food insecurity, energy pricing, Islamic finance, agricultural subsidies, jobs and federalism that moved beyond simple press-release reporting, while the op-eds were sharper. Yet the larger problem remains. Our economic press still reports symptoms more easily than it investigates systems. It records numbers, quotes officials, reproduces chamber complaints, notes donor language and moves to the next event, while what remains missing is institutional memory, local research and the habit of asking why the same problems keep returning.
Take exports. Business Recorder and Profit reported that July exports rose by 10 percent, with textiles leading the increase, but Pakistan has celebrated export upticks many times before and the harder question is whether this is a structural shift or another temporary movement in a familiar cycle. Which firms invested, which markets expanded, were refunds cleared, did energy pricing become competitive, were customs procedures simplified, did tariff policy support exports or revenue extraction, and did productivity improve?
Profit did well to note that consumer-goods imports also rose sharply, warning that an export increase can coexist with the old import-led leakage, but the story needed an export ledger rather than only an export headline. The trade-deficit story made the same point from the other side. A deficit is not simply a bad number; it has a composition. Imports may reflect machinery, raw material, energy dependence or consumption, and each implies a different economy, but our reporting still treats the external account as a scoreboard rather than as evidence of what the economy is producing, importing, consuming and failing to export.
The food-insecurity story was one of the strongest pieces of the week because it challenged a lazy national habit. Pakistan often talks about food security as if the only question is supply, while Profit rightly shifted the issue to affordability: households are not merely facing shortage, they are quietly downgrading diets, consuming less protein, less milk, fewer pulses and more cheap calories. But even here the next step is missing, because food affordability is also about storage, transport, wholesale markets, mandi regulation, support prices, import timing, middlemen, urban retail, competition and logistics. A good story says people cannot afford food; a better story asks which market structures make food expensive between farm and household.
Energy coverage also improved, but again not enough. Dawn’s report on the 75 paisa per unit fuel-cost adjustment was useful because it did not merely report the surcharge; it noted Nepra’s concern over partial loading charges, CPPA’s explanation that rooftop solar has reduced daytime demand, and the warning that wind and solar may need curtailment if demand falls at certain hours. That is the real energy story now. Pakistan is not just facing high tariffs. It is facing a grid-design and management crisis where losses mount up to raise price and consumers who can afford it escape to rooftop solar. As a result, the grid loses good demand, capacity costs remain, and consumers left behind pay more.
This is not a monthly tariff story. It is a political economy of stranded capacity, bad contracts, weak regulation and a centralised power system meeting decentralised technology. The press still reports energy as bills and adjustments, when it should be investigating the design failure and the failure of energy and planning ministries that rushed into IPP adventures in coal and LNG power generation without proper feasibility or research on emerging trends.
Our economic press still reports symptoms more easily than it investigates systems.
Petroleum pricing is no different. Restoring the petroleum levy to Rs80 per litre is not merely a revenue decision; it is taxation through fuel because the state cannot build a credible tax system elsewhere. It taxes transport, agriculture, freight, mobility and household budgets, while allowing the state to avoid expenditure reform and the rationalisation of tax policy and administration for the needs of a growing economy.
Dawn’s piece on Islamic finance had useful numbers on Islamic banking assets, deposits and Sukuk, but several questions remained unexamined. How different is Islamic banking from conventional banking? Is it offering higher or lower returns to depositors, and why? Does it deepen competition, lower intermediation costs and expand enterprise finance, or does it merely provide Shariah-compliant instruments for funding the state? If Islamic finance becomes another route for sovereign borrowing, it may change the form of finance without changing its economic function.
Opeds
The op-ed pages did better because they asked structural questions. Ishrat Husain’s “The growth-jobs paradox” was an important intervention because it made the point that GDP growth does not automatically create formal, productive jobs. South Asia has grown, but employment has not kept pace with the number of educated young people entering the labour force, while weak manufacturing absorption, surplus labour in agriculture, low female participation, automation and education-employer mismatch all matter.
For Pakistan, however, this argument must go further. The growth-jobs paradox is also a university-governance paradox. PHEC and HEDP-related research, including my own work on graduate employability, shows that degrees in Pakistan are weakly connected to jobs, firms, skills and productivity. The constraint is not simply worker effort; it is a bureaucratically regulated university system producing credentials for labour markets that are not expanding and skills that employers do not value.
There is also a technology-choice problem. It is tempting to say Pakistan should choose a more labour-intensive path of growth, but that choice may not be freely available if the country wants to embed itself in global supply chains and export competitively. Modern production networks come with given technologies, standards, logistics, automation, quality controls and scale requirements. To assume a perfectly smooth production function, where Pakistan can simply substitute labour for capital at will, is unrealistic. The real question is not whether we can wish for labour-intensive growth, but whether we can build firms, cities, skills, logistics and institutions that allow workers to participate productively in the technologies global markets already require.
Pakistan’s economic journalism is improving in themes, but not yet in discipline. It needs trackers, not just stories; memory, not just quotes; local research, not only donor documents.
Khurram Husain’s “Wrecking the provinces” was equally important because it treated fiscal federalism as political economy, not arithmetic. The NFC is not merely a formula; it is a political settlement tied to the 18th Amendment, provincial autonomy, representation and mistrust of centralised rule. The attempt to revisit provincial resources cannot be discussed as an accounting exercise, because it is about who controls resources as Pakistan moves from stabilisation to another promised growth phase.
But the debate also needs the local-government lens. Pakistan devolved resources from Islamabad to provincial capitals, but it did not devolve power to cities, districts and citizens. Provinces often became mini-centres, local governments remained weak, and service delivery remained bureaucratic. The wider debate on creating more provinces has been even weaker, proceeding largely as political assertion rather than economic analysis. Advocates claim that smaller provinces will improve health, education and service delivery, but rarely ask why existing provincial governments have failed in these areas.
The problem is not only distance from Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar or Quetta; it is the governance model itself: centralised bureaucracies, rigid rules, weak school and hospital autonomy, poor teacher and doctor incentives, politicised postings, procurement delays, regulatory overreach and almost no accountability to citizens. If education is run through the same department, grade system, transfers, approvals and curriculum controls, why should a smaller province automatically produce better learning? If health is governed through the same hierarchy, procurement rules, postings and weak facility authority, why should a new provincial capital improve care? More provinces may multiply assemblies, secretariats, ministers, residences, cars, protocols and bureaucratic empires without touching the actual failures in classrooms, clinics, sanitation, policing, property rights or city management.
Business Recorder’s analytical pieces were among the week’s strongest. Its work on trade failure reminded readers that Pakistan lost three decades while neighbours integrated into global trade. Its pieces on the future grid, refinery upgrades and deemed duty showed that energy policy is a network of pricing, investment, technology, hidden taxation and stranded assets. Its piece on farm intervention was especially good because it asked the right policy question: what constraint is the subsidy trying to solve — liquidity, risk, input prices, income support or food availability?
The Missing economic conversation
The debate must move beyond the obvious to more granular issues. It is not enough to say “support farmers,” “increase exports,” “create jobs,” “reform energy,” “improve governance” or “prepare the workforce.” These phrases have become policy wallpaper. The real questions are precise. Which rule blocks entry, which agency delays investment, which tax provision creates distortion, which subsidy protects incumbents, which approval creates rent-seeking, which university regulation weakens employability, which banking rule favors sovereign lending over enterprise, and which city regulation prevents density, mobility and jobs?
This is where the press still falls short. It rarely uses local research as a discipline, even though Pakistan has produced serious work on regulatory sludge, PSDP reform, cities as engines of growth, markets rather than permissions, university reform, banking concentration, taxation and the state footprint. Newspapers often write as if the only serious economic knowledge comes from the IMF, the World Bank, the finance ministry, the SBP, chambers of commerce or visiting experts, while domestic research remains decorative rather than central.
The result is fragmented journalism. Food is one story, exports another, credit another, energy another, universities another, federalism another, but Pakistan’s crisis is not fragmented. The same state machinery runs through all of it: excessive permissions, weak markets, bureaucratic control, poor measurement, fiscal hunger, banking tied to government debt, donor framing, weak universities, missing local governments and little accountability for outcomes.
Good journalism should connect these dots. A trade-deficit story should lead to export policy history, a power-bill story should become a grid-market investigation, a private-credit story should examine bank balance sheets, a food-insecurity story should follow market structure, a jobs column should trigger scrutiny of universities and labour-market data, and a federalism column should open the question of cities and local government.
Pakistan’s economic journalism is improving in themes, but not yet in discipline. It needs trackers, not just stories; memory, not just quotes; local research, not only donor documents. The op-eds are ahead of the reporting, but they too must integrate and stop operating in silos. Until journalism learns to investigate the system beneath the announcements, it will remain better-written stenography with occasional flashes of insight.