Pakistan’s conference economy: research for reform or extravaganza?

Pakistan has one industry that never fails to grow. Conferences. Every week brings another one, on reform, on sustainability, on competitiveness, on governance. The halls fill up. Ministers arrive, speak and leave. Donors take the front row. There are banners and keynotes, award ceremonies and report launches, and a great many photographs. Then everyone goes home, and the economy carries on exactly as before.

So what are these events for? Do they produce knowledge? Or are they festivals where the same people say the same things to each other, once a year, in better clothes?

Take three run by serious institutions that claim to connect research with policy: SDPI’s Sustainable Development Conference, the PSDE conference at PIDE, and IBA Karachi’s international economics conference. I read their programmes. Not the press releases. The programmes. Who spoke, for how long, on what, and with what evidence in hand.

SDPI’s conference ran for four days. Alongside the sessions came an investment expo, sustainability awards, a lifetime achievement award, a best pavilion award, fireside chats on corporate sustainability and a steady parade of report launches. Its high-level dialogue on reforms for growth named at least fifteen speakers. Former finance ministers, committee chairs, a provincial speaker, a journalist. Fifteen people, one session. Do the arithmetic. Each gets a few minutes to state a position, the moderator thanks everyone for their valuable insights, and the hall empties. No paper was presented. Nobody had to defend a claim against someone who disagreed.

PSDE did better, and it deserves credit for that. Twenty-four papers, eight sessions, a discussant for each. But the papers ran four rooms at a time, squeezed into two slots, roughly half an hour each. The main hall went to the minister, the panels, the memorial lectures and showcases of PIDE’s own projects. IBA managed twenty-five papers with discussants, a respectable ratio. Its main stage, though, belonged to the World Bank, the IMF and the ADB.

Research happened. In the side rooms. A research conference and a festival are different animals. Both may be legitimate. We should stop pretending they are the same thing. The format is the smaller problem. The bigger one is what nobody chose to study.

Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of announcements. It suffers from a shortage of evidence: on institutions, on markets the state will not allow to form, on cities run by clerks. Ask what actually decides whether anyone here can invest or grow a firm. Local government. The civil service. Regulation. Land. The planning system. Now go looking for these in the programs. You will be looking for a while.

Deregulation surfaced as “regulatory harmonisation”, which is a polite way of avoiding the subject. The real problem is sludge. Permissions, NOCs, discretionary approvals, zoning rules, licences, the inspector who must be kept happy. Why are our markets in housing, finance, energy and urban services so thin? Why does the state insist on running things rather than setting rules and stepping back? No session was built around that question.

Cities got even less. They are where productivity lives, everywhere in the world. Ours are governed by a tangle of authorities. No empowered mayors, no fiscal autonomy, zoning that forbids density, budgets that love flyovers and ignore neighbourhoods. IBA held its conference in Karachi. Not one of its twenty-five papers was about Karachi.

Then there was the debate that should have filled every hall. In July, the interior minister declared that the governance system had collapsed. In September, the planning minister floated twelve to fifteen provinces, or else 160 empowered districts. Others want thirty-two. This is a question about the shape of the state itself. What does a new province cost in governors, secretariats, assemblies, and perks? Would empowered districts deliver more for less? What happens to the NFC award? What does the record of the 2001 devolution actually show? The planning minister opened both PSDE and SDPI this autumn. Neither built a research session around his proposal. The debate was left to politicians and the nine o’clock talk shows.

Civil service reform: silence. Secretaries still control autonomous bodies, sit on their boards and decide who runs them. Decades of reform commissions have produced reports, not change. Why? Nobody asked.

The PSDP: silence. Projects are announced for the ribbon-cutting and abandoned when maintenance falls due. The throw-forward keeps growing. PSDE was organised in collaboration with the Ministry of Planning. Who exactly was going to put the planning ministry’s portfolio on trial at a conference the ministry co-hosted?

Energy is a forty-year crisis. Power-sector circular debt stood at about Rs1.6 trillion in June 2025, and that was after a big clean-up. Capacity payments, distribution losses, no competitive market. SDPI talked about hydrogen and the energy transition. Fine. But why did we build generation without fixing distribution, regulation and market design? Were the coal and LNG deals ever justified? Who profits from the present mess? Discuss a transition without that reckoning, and we will repeat the mess, this time with solar panels.

And autos. On 7 November, the government unveiled a new auto policy that phases down tariffs on imported cars over five years and promises USD 6 billion in exports. Decades of protection, a live fight between assemblers, parts makers and consumers, and a policy landing in the middle of conference season. Was it evaluated anywhere? What have consumers paid for localisation? Did protection ever produce an exporter? Again, silence.

Look at who sets the questions and the pattern makes sense. PSDE built its entire conference around the government’s USD 100 billion export target. The call for papers asked for research to “support the mission”. Economists should begin by asking whether a target is feasible, and what has blocked exports for thirty years. Not by enlisting.

But the loudest silence was about the people with the most say over Pakistani policy. The donors.

Donor money no longer sits outside the government. It sits inside. The FCDO’s REMIT programmes, run by Adam Smith International, places consultants across tax, investment, and trade. They report jointly to FBR officials and to their own team leads, and they help implement reforms the IMF has mandated. BRAVE, another FCDO programme running until 2028, is embedding its version of climate resilience into government systems. These programmes write terms of reference, draft rules and shape ministries’ work plans. They hire consultant after consultant. Their designs and their results are never put before a Pakistani research audience. Who chose the priorities? On what evidence? What did the last round leave behind once the consultants flew home?

At our conferences, donors appear as oracles. SDPI’s closing plenary on where reform matters most put the IMF, the ADB, the FCDO and the UN on stage to tell Pakistan what to do. Nobody asked them what their own programmes had achieved.

Then there is the IMF. Pakistan is in its 25th programs since 1958. By PIDE’s own count, the country spent 34 of the 65 years after its first programmes inside one. The current programme reaches into provincial budgets. No institution has had more say over our macroeconomic policy. At these conferences it gets a panel seat and polite questions.

Twenty-five programmes, and the crisis keeps coming back. Either Pakistan keeps failing to follow good advice, or the advice is wrong, or both. Do the conditions treat symptoms, revenue targets and energy prices, while the over-centralized state that produces the crises goes untouched? That is a researchable question with sixty years of data behind it. Why is nobody researching it?

Should these conferences take this on? Of course, they should. Evaluate the IMF programmes, openly, with papers and discussants. Require technical assistance programs working inside ministries to publish their reports and face review. And ask, honestly, whether think tanks that live on the same donors’ grants can afford to bite.

None of this needs a new institution. Publish papers before the conference. Build each session around a hypothesis, thesis or a burning issue and someone who thinks it is wrong. Give discussants time and teeth. Invite critics. Academics require debate. Boring agreement panels should be avoided. Put the donors on the agenda as a subject, not as keynote speakers. And open every conference by asking what the issues confronting the economy and policy are!

Pakistan does not lack conferences. It lacks serious questions and debates on important issues. Without this, we have a festival. Let us stop calling it a research conference.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026