WHAT will Pakistan look like in 2047, a century after it achieved independence? Given its unstable politics, weak economy and fragile law and order, and the rapidly evolving global and regional geopolitics, it is not easy to predict Pakistan’s future. Therefore, projections must be based mainly on proposed reforms the country should legislate on and earnestly implement to reconstruct the economic trajectory it had once embarked upon during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Central to the proposed reforms is a clearly articulated vision and a detailed long-term economic plan. An overview of the recent past reveals that we failed to achieve results even when the planning was sound on paper. In 1990, Pakistan launched an ambitious programme of economic liberalisation. However, this programme fell victim to the political instability of the 1990s. Another attempt was made in the late 1990s to draft a vision and long-term plan in the form of Vision 2010. This was scuttled by the military coup of 1999.