Losing the plot

YOU can tell when a government in Pakistan has lost the plot when they turn to the bureaucrats for ideas on how to make change happen. There are usually many other markers for this loss of the plot, but once the bureaucrats are in charge of generating the ideas which inform the government’s agenda for change, you can say pretty clearly that the gig is up and they have gone into treading water mode. For this government, that point was reached a few months ago, and evidence was the changes they were trying to bring in the power sector as well as the tax system, which I have written about earlier. People asked me why I was singling out the bureaucrats for the lack of change in Pakistan’s economic management, since it is a common understanding that bureaucrats are responsible for running and safeguarding the system and not changing it. I used to think this too, until more recently I learned from a cursory study of India’s economic reforms that this perception is not true.