People vs the system

MUCH will be written about the budget’s specifics, but there is something else on my mind this year. This budget marks nearly a quarter century of back-to-back, virtually nonstop IMF programmes that Pakistan has been on. This means for 25, or a quarter of a century now, we have had a near continuous run of austerity as national economic policy, with the exception of three brief spurts of short-lived growth in between. And even those were fuelled by external, debt-creating inflows. We could take this story further back perhaps. But the year 2000 forms a good cut-off point because it also saw the implementation of a tough IMF Stand-by Arrangement, the same as the one today, following months of a troubled programme. The outlines of that programme, as well as each one that followed, were the same. So the wheel has turned full circle from that point — a short and tough stand-by, followed by a longer and more sustained Extended Fund Facility, and today, we stand in the same moment we were in the summer of 2001.