Recent commentary has challenged the premise behind Pakistan’s renewed export targets and the optimism that they can meaningfully narrow the trade gap. The country indeed has a long record of announcing ambitious targets, missing them, and moving on to the next headline without accountability.
There is also a basic arithmetic problem: reaching USD 63 billion would require export growth far above Pakistan’s historical trend. That point may be statistically correct, but it is not a policy diagnosis. There is no denying the need for structural shifts. The question is which ones. Too often, the debate is reduced to a false binary. Either USD 63bn is achieved, or the effort is dismissed as another failure. That framing is conceptually erroneous.
Much of the current debate collapses two distinct questions, namely, whether targets have been missed before, and whether today’s reform approach is materially different.
Historically, Pakistan’s export strategies have largely taken a broad-based approach, treating exports as a macroeconomic issue to be nudged through incentives and subsidies. While this method has often generated short-term gains, it has failed to deliver sustained growth over the long run, largely due to a persistent mismatch between policy design and industrial realities.
Experience in successful export economies suggests Pakistan’s underperformance is less about strategic intent than about frictions inside value chains, including regulation, procedures, risk, and costs, that blunt firms’ ability to scale.
The Planning Commission’s technical export roadmap is not designed to chase headlines or dress up unrealistic numbers. Nor is it a fresh round of wishful policy formulation.
The roadmap separates near-term export acceleration to 2029 from longer-term systemic transformation through 2035. In the first phase, the approach shifts from broad sector prescriptions to a product-by-product assessment of export “headroom”, grounded in value chains and competitiveness diagnostics and structured consultation with exporters.
The strategy avoids simply extrapolating the current export mix, a method that would be operationally implausible. Instead, it identifies specific products where Pakistan already possesses elements of competitive advantage, an established local industrial base, and credible opportunities to grow capacity, provided targeted regulatory and procedural fixes remove the binding constraints, with the objective of increasing value addition and diversification in smaller but higher-potential segments, and deepening industrial specialisation.
Our internal assessment draws on the existing trade base, global demand trends, scalability, and the potential for value up-gradation across Pakistan’s current production structure, and identifies twenty priority export products with immediate scale potential, grouped across textiles and apparel, leather and footwear, sports and surgical goods, engineering and light manufacturing, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, agri-food, IT services, minerals, and selected crafts.
We then asked exporters in these segments a simpler question: what stops them from expanding, even from USD 10m to USD 11m, within a given product line? Why do enterprises hesitate to increase capacity or address productivity gaps? Which bureaucratic hurdles slow shipments, raise costs or introduce uncertainty? What regulatory bottlenecks limit their potential? What information gaps restrict entry into new markets?
We asked these questions across each link of the value chain, from inputs to compliance, logistics, and market access.
Familiar pressure points surfaced repeatedly, including delayed tax refunds, logistics bottlenecks, security risks, high energy costs, compliance gaps and policy inconsistency. These are not irritants to be endured. They are binding constraints that require explicit, subsector-specific remedies.
The work also surfaced cross-cutting opportunities, including shared inputs, compliance infrastructure, logistics upgrades and market channels, which could lift multiple sectors at once. Further rounds, through surveys with chambers, associations and public agencies, will refine the diagnostic map and integrate firm-identified opportunities into policy design.
Pakistan’s export problem is not a shortage of ambition. It is a repeated failure to mitigate the known impediments because of institutional inertia, bureaucratic obfuscation, and weak execution. Our approach acknowledges this history and attempts to correct it.
The appropriate test, therefore, is not whether the number sounds familiar, but whether the policy measures outlined are implemented, sequenced, and institutionalised. If it lowers unit costs, strengthens compliance capacity, improves logistics and raises capacity utilisation, the gains would be concrete and durable. Targets are a discipline, not a panacea.
Healthy scepticism is necessary. Strategic fatalism is not.
Using IMF export projections as a realism test for the USD 63bn goal mistakes a baseline for a forecast. IMF baselines typically assume policy continuity. They are not product- or industry-level forecasts. Treating them as ceilings rather than reference points reflects a category mistake, turning conservative assumptions into inevitability.
The Planning Commission does not suggest that exports can grow despite instability. The claim is that reducing instability, through predictable rules, faster procedures and credible enforcement, is the policy correction itself and a prerequisite for sustained export growth and long-term investment.
If Pakistan dismisses every attempt to move beyond declaratory policy on the grounds that past attempts failed, it guarantees that future ones will as well. The real question is not whether export earnings reach USD 63bn by 2029, but whether the country finally undertakes the unglamorous, incremental, and conscientious work required to make export growth structurally possible.
The Uraan Pakistan framework is a statement of national aspiration, defining where Pakistan must aim. There is no inherent problem in aiming high.
Countries such as Bangladesh, South Korea, Vietnam, India, and Turkey show that ambitious export targets can serve not merely as projections, but as mechanisms to convert strategy into execution through targeted reforms. Pakistan already has export capability; what it lacks is predictability, compliance credibility and value capture.
Even partial progress can strengthen competitiveness if it shifts the export mix, improves reliability and enhances value addition. What matters is the pathway.
A systematic, product-specific, micro-level perspective allows strategic intent to translate into operational priorities and tactical reforms. Execution will determine whether this roadmap becomes reality or remains another document.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is a Member (Private Sector Development and Competitiveness) at the Planning Commission, Islamabad
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