EDITORIAL: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s decision to bring Pakistan’s sprawling business regulations under a comprehensive regulatory registry and push for greater uniformity across the country deserves appreciation.
Businesses have spent far too long navigating overlapping requirements, different procedures and regulations administered by authorities that can sometimes appear unaware of what another arm of government is doing. If implemented properly, a unified regulatory framework could remove one of the most persistent and unnecessary obstacles to doing business in Pakistan.
The scale of the exercise is encouraging. The Cabinet’s Regulatory Reforms Committee has approved 557 reforms across seven areas, which the government estimates could save businesses Rs460 billion annually.
The prime minister has also ordered nationwide implementation of the Easy Business Act, greater coordination with provincial governments and the creation of a registry bringing existing regulatory requirements, rules and regulations into one system. These are sensible measures because regulatory complexity carries a real economic cost, even when that cost never appears explicitly in a tax bill.
Pakistan’s problem has rarely been a shortage of rules. Businesses must contend with federal, provincial and local authorities, licensing requirements, approvals, registrations and procedures that can overlap or contradict one another.
The resulting uncertainty consumes management time, increases compliance costs and creates opportunities for arbitrary interpretation. It also particularly disadvantages smaller businesses that lack the legal, administrative and financial resources available to large corporations for navigating bureaucracy.
Greater uniformity could therefore produce benefits well beyond the government’s estimated savings. A business deciding whether to invest needs to know which rules apply, which authority administers them, how long approvals should take and whether the same requirements will remain in force tomorrow.
A comprehensive regulatory registry could provide that clarity if it becomes an authoritative, regularly updated source rather than another government portal added to an already crowded administrative landscape.
There is also merit in attempting to harmonise systems across provinces. Pakistan’s federal structure necessarily gives different levels of government their respective constitutional responsibilities, and regulatory reform must respect those boundaries.
Yet federalism does not require businesses to confront avoidable procedural incompatibilities whenever they cross a provincial border. Common standards, interoperable systems and coordinated procedures can reduce duplication while leaving legitimate provincial authority intact.
The SIFC’s proposed engagement with provincial governments should therefore concentrate on practical harmonisation rather than administrative centralisation.
The most important part of the prime minister’s instructions, however, concerns implementation and independent validation. Pakistan has produced enough reform announcements whose benefits looked considerably better in presentations than they eventually did on the ground.
The government says 557 reforms will generate Rs460 billion in annual savings. That is a substantial claim and should now become a measurable benchmark. Third-party validation must establish how those savings were calculated and, subsequently, whether businesses actually experience them.
The same discipline should apply to the Business Facilitation Centres. Processing thousands of applications is useful, but the more meaningful measures will be processing times, reductions in required approvals, compliance costs, rejection rates and feedback from businesses themselves.
Ministries should also be held to the implementation deadlines already ordered, with progress published periodically so that delays and institutional resistance cannot disappear inside the bureaucracy.
The government has identified a genuine problem and, on paper, proposed a credible way of addressing it. Bringing scattered regulations into one accessible system, reducing contradictions and coordinating procedures across jurisdictions could materially improve the business environment.
The private sector should now be involved continuously in identifying where the reforms work and where regulatory friction remains.
For once, the right hand and the left hand are being asked to read the same rulebook. The real test is whether the bureaucracy actually opens it.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026