Eye washing and number juggling seems to be the favourite pastimes of the government. From managing fiscal deficit numbers to GDP growth figures, the government is increasingly proving itself to be an untrustworthy entity.
The latest saga is the so-called 'typo' that the Ministry of Finance made in its Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies (MEFP) it submitted to the IMF. The MEFP said that GDP growth in FY14 stood at 3.3 percent, a number markedly lower than what the government had been otherwise advertising (4.1%) at every opportunity.
Its hard to believe that the government could manage to goof up on a matter of such great importance. And its not as if that this 'typo' existed in one of those exhaustive tables at the fag end of the MEFP. The sentence "We now expect that GDP will expand by about 3.3 percent in FY 2013/14, while in the next fiscal year, the expansion should accelerate to around 4 percent," is written on the first page of the MEFP; indeed the very first paragraph.
And this is exactly why one is inclined not to believe that this was a typo. Sorry FinMin: in the backdrop of previous such instances of number jugglery, you are guilty of something fishy until proven innocent. Readers would recall how the first quarter FY14 GDP numbers of about five percent invited criticism from a host of independent economists. Later, the government had to accept its mistake and eventually corrected its position.
However, to be fair to the PML-N, one can say that Finance Minister Ishaq Dar doesn't have a monopoly on number juggling. The politics of data have been going on since many a decades in Pakistan.
One recent example is from the Shaukat Aziz regime when governments poverty numbers were cooked up to show a miraculous amelioration in poverty headcount index from 34.5 percent in 2001-02 to 17.2 percent in 2007-08. The World Bank supported those numbers, since they funded that project. But the controversy eventually caught heat, compelling the then Chief Economist of Planning Commission Dr Pervez Tahir to resign in protest against number fudging.
The bottom line of this story is that data forms the building blocks of democracy. If democracy is about taking the society forward by means of discussions and negotiations and by being accountable, then it is the clear and transparent data that facilitates these discussions.
This country urgently needs a strong and autonomous statistics division--and in that vein, the umbilical cord between the finance ministry and the PBS has to be cut. The PBSs top slot has to be a tenured post, filled by a competent statistician, to allow the incumbent to work independently without fear or favour. But perhaps thats too much to ask from Le Accountant.