Pakistan does not need a hard state. It needs a development state. Egypt is a hard state; Vietnam is a development state. Anyone serious about Pakistan's future must understand the difference. The obvious counter-example is India. It has remained a democracy since independence, its military has stayed out of politics, and its economic performance has been substantially better than Pakistan's. That matters. The military's repeated interventions have profoundly affected Pakistan's civilian institutions, political parties and the state itself. Civilian supremacy and constitutional government are therefore part of Pakistan's problem. But India does not establish that democracy, or free and fair elections, is a sufficient theory of development. Its experience is one part of a larger historical record.
India's transformation also depended on factors that have little to do with elections: an enormous domestic market, human-capital accumulation, an entrepreneurial sector, institutional continuity, gradual liberalisation after 1991, global integration and technological capability. India itself contains enormous variation—some states have built far greater productive capacity than others under the same national democratic system.
I recently exchanged views on X with Salman Akram Raja, the PTI's secretary general, over precisely this question: can a state impose economic development through coercion, or does sustained progress require political freedom and democracy? Salman wrote: "The myth of a state that runs on coercion, somehow imposes economic development and fills the coffers of the state while denying the people basic human dignity is nonsense that history has exposed again and again. Such a state is not a 'hard' state but a lawless farce that hollows out the state. For every coercive-development state in East Asia there are dozens of failed dictatorships in Africa and South America. Every Pakistani dictatorship has left the country structurally and economically weaker."
Ilhan Niaz, a history professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, responded that "the West’s industrial modernisation owes nearly nothing to democracy since in those cases democracy was the outcome, not the cause, of said modernisation. This holds even in the context of the US/UK. Also, much of the capital for European modernisation was furnished through overseas colonial expropriation, enslavement, genocide. In other societies, while it is correct that there are many failed autocratic governments, practically all cases of successful transition to industrial society occurred under enlightened dictatorships. In South Asia, we have poor quality and arbitrary governance regardless of form of government. So the choice here is between a bad democracy or a bad autocracy.”
The exchange illustrates a deeper problem in Pakistan's debate: the search for a single theory of development. Democracy or dictatorship, markets or the state, liberalisation or protection, inclusive institutions or strong government—one is presented as the missing ingredient. There is no one theory of development, and history provides no universal blueprint or predetermined sequence through which countries become prosperous.
That proposition is relevant today. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi has declared that Pakistan's governance system has effectively "collapsed," triggering fresh speculation about the current hybrid setup. Given Naqvi's position and his close association with Field Marshal Asim Munir, the remark cannot be dismissed as rhetoric. But the more important question is what kind of state Pakistan has been building. The debate is again about who should rule—civilians, the military, or some hybrid—when changing who occupies the commanding heights does not automatically change the political economy beneath them.
Here Salman Raja's argument, despite its moral force, falls short. To describe coercive developmental states as "lawless farces" because many dictatorships failed is to substitute moral condemnation for comparative analysis. A state that denies human dignity and relies on arbitrary coercion is obviously undesirable, but that does not explain why some authoritarian states transformed agrarian societies into industrial economies while others became predatory failures, or why some democracies developed rapidly while others stayed trapped in patronage and low productivity. For a leader deeply involved in Pakistan's constitutional debate, reducing this to coercion versus democracy is surprisingly thin.
Raja is not wrong to criticise authoritarianism; but he is asking the wrong question. Development is not produced by coercion any more than by democracy. What matters is whether a state can build productive capabilities, accumulate human capital, foster technological learning, mobilise investment and discipline rent-seeking. Regime type matters, but it is neither sufficient nor universal as an explanation.
Dani Rodrik, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world's leading development scholars, made this point in One Economics, Many Recipes. General economic principles do not translate into universally optimal policies, because countries face different constraints. Successful economies have combined markets, state intervention, openness, protection and institutional reform differently at different stages.
Branko Milanović, former World Bank lead economist and a leading scholar of global inequality, similarly shows how differently capitalism has evolved, and how hard it is to isolate one political or institutional variable as the cause of development. The question is not whether capitalism requires democracy or development requires authoritarianism, but what combination of state capacity, markets, global integration, investment and political institutions produces sustained productivity growth.
The postwar East Asian experience is the clearest challenge to simplistic theories. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China and Vietnam followed very different political paths yet achieved extraordinary transformation. South Korea and Taiwan industrialised before becoming liberal democracies; Singapore prospered under a dominant-party system; China transformed hundreds of millions of lives under a Leninist system while progressively introducing markets and private enterprise.
This is not an "East Asian exception." These economies span more than two billion people across several generations—too large, diverse and sustained to dismiss as an outlier because it doesn't fit a preferred theory. Doing so makes the theory unfalsifiable: conforming countries validate it, non-conforming ones are declared exceptions. Nor does East Asia prove authoritarianism causes development. History contains far more failed dictatorships than successful developmental states. The relevant distinction is between a state that uses power to build productive capacity and one that uses it to distribute rents and protect elites.
Yuen Yuen Ang, Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins and author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, challenges the assumption that countries must first acquire "good institutions" and only then grow — what she calls the Western fairy tale of development. Development, she argues, is evolutionary: markets and institutions coevolve, and countries often begin with imperfect institutions transformed as economic complexity increases. China's "directed improvisation"—central objectives combined with local experimentation—matters not as a model for Pakistan, but because it shows how little development resembles installing a ready-made institutional package.
Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT and 2024 Nobel laureate, and James A. Robinson, University Professor at the University of Chicago, made an enormously important contribution by showing how institutions shape incentives and long-run prosperity. Their distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions captures something fundamental but becomes problematic when treated as a complete theory of development. East Asia shows that economic transformation and institutional evolution can occur in different sequences, and that a mature economy's institutions need not be those with which industrialisation began. As the Financial Times observed of Why Nations Fail, it "is not the last word on these questions; simplification is necessary in research but has limitations when used as a grand theory of everything."
My own analysis of 29 of the world's largest countries, published in The Nation in 2024, provides an empirical check. The countries, each with populations of at least 50 million, together account for about six billion people, roughly 75% of the world's population. I compared their real per-capita income growth over 1991–2022 against political systems as classified by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The results do not support the proposition that democracy or authoritarianism, by itself, determines economic performance. Authoritarian and hybrid regimes recorded average annual real per-capita income growth of 2.83%, against 2.19% for flawed democracies and 1.62% for full democracies; even excluding China, the authoritarian/hybrid average was 2.44%.
More revealingly, developing East Asia and the Pacific recorded average annual growth of 6.2%—more than three times Africa's or Latin America's rates—with real per-capita incomes more than tripling. China averaged 8.3%, Vietnam 5.5%, India 4.5%, Bangladesh 4.2% and South Korea 3.9%, while Pakistan managed only 1.8%. These figures do not prove authoritarianism causes growth; they show regime type alone is a poor predictor of development. What matters is what states do with their power: whether they build human capital and infrastructure, foster technological learning and competitive industries, integrate productively into global markets, and develop institutions capable of adapting as economies change. Pakistan's problem is not simply too much or too little democracy. Successive political systems have failed to build the productive capabilities needed for sustained high productivity and export-led growth.
History contains far more failed dictatorships than successful developmental states. The relevant distinction is between a state that uses power to build productive capacity and one that uses it to distribute rents and protect elites.
Pakistan's own history should make us wary of regime determinism. Military governments have come and gone, civilian governments have returned, constitutions have been suspended and restored, elections held and contested. Yet the underlying political economy has remained remarkably persistent. Privileged groups compete for access to state resources while the state struggles to generate the human capital, fiscal capacity, technological capability and globally competitive industries needed for sustained productivity growth.
Pakistan has not, however, been governed by the military establishment alone. The military has dominated governance and bears major responsibility for that dominance, but civilian politicians, bureaucracy and powerful business interests have also been integral to the system. Did the establishment prevent provincial governments from educating their children, or from tackling the poverty and malnutrition that have left millions stunted? Did it alone create the sugar, wheat and land mafias? How many beneficiaries are generals, and how many are politicians and businessmen?
The power sector is revealing. The 1994 IPP policy was introduced under Benazir Bhutto; Nawaz Sharif's government greatly expanded private power generation during the CPEC years, with Pakistani business groups among the beneficiaries. The consequences still run into billions of dollars. Sindh's failures in education, health and governance likewise cannot all be laid at the establishment's door after years of PPP rule. The PPP and PML-N have themselves been integral to Pakistan's governing order for decades.
Nor does the record support the claim that civilians were always powerless and never compromised with the establishment. Benazir Bhutto made repeated political accommodations; Nawaz Sharif was brought into politics by General Zia and later alternated between confrontation and accommodation. The question is not whether the military has intervened—it plainly has—but why civilian elites who exercised power and presided over failed reform should be treated as innocent bystanders.
This is why the civilian-versus-military framing is a false binary. The deeper problem is a predatory state—a joint enterprise of military, political, bureaucratic and business elites who have at different times competed, collaborated and benefited from state power. Free and fair elections and civilian supremacy are essential, but neither will transform the political economy unless the incentives of the entire ruling structure change.
This is also why talk of a "collapsed system" should not automatically mean another change of regime. If the diagnosis is that civilian politicians are incompetent and therefore the military should assume more direct control, we return to the same dead end that has repeatedly failed Pakistan. A state can be extremely powerful in coercive terms and remarkably weak in developmental terms: it can control opponents while failing to reform education, wield enormous authority over domestic politics while unable to broaden the tax base, and command security institutions while failing to build globally competitive industries. Pakistan has never lacked people capable of exercising power. It has lacked a political and bureaucratic system capable of converting power into sustained gains in productivity and living standards.
That is why the distinction between a developmental and an extractive state is more useful than democracy-versus-dictatorship. Chalmers Johnson, who pioneered the developmental-state concept through his study of Japan, Alice Amsden's work on South Korea, and Robert Wade's research on Taiwan showed how governments used finance, trade policy, industrial policy and bureaucracy to accelerate structural transformation. Successful East Asian states did not merely protect private businesses; they disciplined them, linking support to performance, exports and technological upgrading.
Pakistan has too often done the opposite: protection without performance, subsidies without reform, privilege without accountability. Democracy is valuable for political rights, accountability and human dignity, but elections do not automatically create competent bureaucracies, effective education systems, competitive industries or export capability. A democracy captured by patronage networks can remain deeply extractive; authoritarian power can be developmental only under exceptionally demanding conditions.
The obsession with one "correct" model has produced another seductive but inadequate proposition: that if elections were genuinely free and fair and governments allowed to complete their terms, Pakistan's fundamental problems would begin to resolve themselves. Free and fair elections are essential to legitimacy, accountability and peaceful transfers of power. But they are not a development strategy. Elections determine who governs; they do not determine how the economy is governed, how effectively the state collects taxes, whether children receive quality education, whether electricity is affordable, whether protected industries become competitive, or whether political elites stop extracting rents.
An extractive political economy can survive perfectly well under competitive elections. Politicians can be freely elected and still distribute patronage, protect vested interests, subsidise inefficient enterprises, resist tax reform and divert public resources to influential groups. Changing the occupants of the state is not the same as changing the state. Pakistan has experienced military rule, civilian rule and hybrid arrangements, yet elite capture, patronage, weak institutions, low human-capital investment and dependence on external financing have proved remarkably resilient. The same extractive system can operate under a military government, a civilian government or a hybrid regime.
This is not an argument against democracy or elections. It is an argument against confusing political form with developmental capacity. Pakistan needs genuinely free and fair elections, constitutional government and accountable institutions—but also what elections alone cannot deliver: a state capable of building human capital, disciplining rent-seeking, enforcing competition, investing in infrastructure and technology, and sustaining policies that raise productivity and exports. To suggest that better elections are the principal answer to Pakistan's economic and institutional failures is to replace one political reductionism with another. The country does not merely need to change who gets elected; it needs to change what the state does and whose interests it serves.
What Pakistan needs is not another imported theory or political rearrangement dressed up as a solution. It needs to understand its binding constraints and build the capacity to overcome them: mass human-capital formation, a broader and fairer tax base, reliable energy, productive investment, technological learning, competitive markets and an export sector capable of moving beyond low-value products. Above all, it needs institutions that reward productivity rather than connections, and discipline rent-seeking rather than organise it.
The intellectual lesson from development history is more demanding than either side of Pakistan's debate suggests. Democracy is not a development strategy, and neither is authoritarianism. Markets are indispensable, but markets alone do not create the infrastructure, skills or technological capability required for late industrialisation. State intervention can accelerate transformation, but without discipline it degenerates into patronage. Inclusive institutions matter enormously, but they come with no single prescribed sequence.
There is no one theory of development because there is no single historical route to prosperity. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China and Vietnam did not follow the same script; neither did Britain, the United States or continental Europe. Britain did not give women equal voting rights until 1928. Switzerland did not give women the federal vote until 1971. The US became an economic superpower before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
History's lesson is uncomfortable but hard to ignore: countries often get democracy after they get development, not the other way around. Democracy can be the product of prosperity and strong institutions—not necessarily the engine that creates them.
The common thread among successful cases is not a regime label but the ability to build capabilities, solve binding constraints, experiment, learn and adapt. That is precisely what is missing from much of Pakistan's political discourse. We argue endlessly about who should wield power while paying too little attention to what that power is supposed to accomplish. Even educated political leaders reduce a complex historical and economic problem to a choice between democracy and coercion. For a country facing simultaneous fiscal, energy, educational, security, demographic and productivity crises, that intellectual simplicity is no longer good enough.
Pakistan does not need another argument about who should rule. It needs a serious argument about how a state under whatever legitimate constitutional arrangement can actually develop the country. Even Francis Fukuyama, who once declared the end of history, has since conceded there is no end to it. Pakistan's first intellectual step is to abandon the comforting fiction that history has supplied one answer. The truth is starker: we are lost, dressing up drift in lofty language while the elite play power games and grow richer. This is why Imran Khan's stance resonates with so many Pakistanis. But little was done to reform the economy on his watch. His excuse: the military wouldn't let him. Then why not resign in protest? The same question applies to every prime minister since 1988. Which is exactly why authoritarianism versus democracy is a false binary in Pakistan.