Pakistan’s economy doesn’t need more experts; it needs one owner

Pakistan’s economic crisis is not a shortage of talent. It is a surplus of ownership, so much of it that none of it counts for anything.

The National Economic Council sits at the top, the only forum with a constitutional mandate under Article 156 to coordinate financial, commercial, and economic policy between the centre and the provinces. Below it, the Planning Commission runs its own economic assessment. The Finance Ministry runs another.

The Prime Minister’s Office has assembled its own economic advisory team.

The Economic Advisory Council, meant to bring independent expertise into this picture, meets irregularly, with little continuity of membership or follow-through from one sitting to the next, so even its better ideas rarely survive beyond the meeting where they were raised.

The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) runs a parallel investment track. Several rooms, several sets of numbers, one economy.

This is not a hidden problem. The system has, in effect, said so about itself. At the June 2026 NEC session, a meeting that had already been postponed twice, from May 22 to June 3 to June 8, the council conceded that it had drifted from its constitutional role into a forum that merely stamped the development budget, rather than the body empowered to steer national financial and economic policy.

The response on the table was to meet quarterly instead of annually. That is a calendar fix for an architectural problem. Meeting more often does not resolve who owns the file between meetings.

The cost of that lack of ownership is now evident in the numbers, not just in the org chart. The economy grew by 3.7 percent, short of target, while exports fell by more than 6 percent in FY26.

Fixed investment remained stuck at 12.7 percent of GDP, against a 13 percent target; private investment inched to 9.6 percent, against 9.8 percent. SIFC, created specifically to cut through exactly this kind of institutional friction for investors, has eased procedural bottlenecks but has not helped secure major foreign investment.

Every one of these bodies can point to activity. None can point to a result it owns outright, because no result lasts long enough for any desk to be held to it.

Consider an exporter in Faisalabad waiting for a duty drawback tied to an ease-of-doing-business notification. SIFC cleared the policy intent.

The Finance Ministry has to authorise the disbursement mechanism. FBR has to implement it operationally. If the three don’t reconcile before the claim is filed, the exporter is not caught in bureaucracy; he is caught between three separate owners, each of whom can accurately say the delay isn’t theirs.

Multiply that by every stalled export order and every foreign investor who leaves after the second meeting, and the aggregate becomes the investment-to-GDP ratio that Pakistan cannot move.

The same pattern underlies the recurring friction between the Prime Minister’s Office and the country’s other centres of power. Each side has a point about the other, and both are really describing a structure, not a personality conflict. When several bodies can each put forward a credible economic narrative, it becomes easy to point elsewhere, simply because accountability has nowhere to land.

This is not a new story; it is an old one repeating on schedule. Pakistan has written numerous five-year plans, and each has failed in the same way.

A plan designed by the Planning Commission is handed to fifteen ministries and four provincial governments for implementation, none of whom is required to answer to it. Vision 2025 was quietly shelved without a formal reckoning of what was delivered and what wasn’t.

Uraan Pakistan is already following the same pattern. The plan exists in document form long after ownership of its targets has evaporated.

CPEC 2.0 risks repeating the same failure on a larger scale. The first phase built roads, ports and power plants- visible, single-contractor projects that were hard to lose ownership of.

The second phase is not that kind of project. It spans USD 65 billion in planned investment, 44 special economic zones, industrial and technology cooperation, and the ML-1 railway upgrade, split across federal ministries, provincial governments, SEZ authorities and private investors, each holding a piece of execution and none holding the whole.

Analysts reviewing the framework have already flagged the identical gap Pakistan built into its five-year plans: no single-window trade mechanism, weak coordination between departments, and special economic zones stalled at the planning stage for years. Financing was never CPEC’s weak point. Ownership of delivery is, and Pakistan has not yet built the framework that would fix that this time.

The fix is not another economic body. Pakistan does not lack institutions; it lacks a gate between them. The NEC already has the constitutional standing to serve as that gate; what it lacks is a mechanism that makes its authority binding between sessions, not just during them.

That gate should be a small, statutory NEC Certification Secretariat, housed within the Planning Commission’s existing secretariat infrastructure, with no new ministry and no new hires beyond a working cell.

Every economic policy submission, regardless of which body originates it (Finance Ministry, SIFC, the PM’s economic advisory team, or the Planning Commission itself), would require NEC Secretariat certification within a fixed 15-working-day window before it can proceed to the ECC, Cabinet, or ECNEC.

The Cabinet Division, which already controls that routing, would be instructed to return any submission lacking the certificate, unopened. No new law is needed to create this; only a Cabinet Division standing order and NEC endorsement, which the Council can issue at its next sitting.

The same gate should carry Uraan Pakistan’s annual targets and CPEC 2.0’s SEZ and ML-1 milestones, not just policy summaries. Each ministry and SEZ authority would file quarterly delivery status against the plan through the same Secretariat, certified or not, with the certification record itself, not a press release, serving as the record of ownership.

A five-year plan or a bilateral corridor with a standing certification record is much harder to quietly shelve than one that exists only as a launch-day document.

The factor that keeps this from lapsing, as the quarterly-meeting proposal likely will, is external. Pakistan already reports structural benchmarks to the IMF under the ongoing Extended Fund Facility review cycle. Certification-gate compliance, measured by the share of economic submissions that cleared through the Secretariat versus those that bypassed it, should be added as a reported line item in that same quarterly review.

Domestic political will to enforce inter-ministerial discipline has never survived a change of season in Islamabad. An IMF review date does not move for anyone’s convenience, which is precisely why it is the only enforcement mechanism in the room with a track record of making Pakistani institutions show up on time.

Pakistan is not short on resilience, resources, or minds. That much is true and has been true in worse years than this one. What Pakistan has never had is a single ledger that every economic actor is required to record in before their decision becomes policy.

Ownership, diffused across five rooms, is not coordination. It is the absence of anyone who can be asked, six months later, what happened to the plan.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026