Former Finance Minister Shaukat Tareen has said that the import ban imposed by the PML-N government would not benefit the poor people of Pakistan, ARY News reported.
Shaukat Tareen said that banning the import of luxury items is a good step, which they also tried, but it does not benefit the poor people directly.
He said that the incumbent government is confused, statistics prove that their six-week performance has been abysmal. The PTI government left with the Dollar at Rs182, which has shot over Rs200 in just six weeks, he added.
Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb announced on Thursday that the government has imposed a ban on the import of all non-essential luxury items under an “emergency economic plan”.
Protectionism weakens domestic industries. With no foreign competition, industries see no need for innovation. Their products soon decline in quality, while becoming more expensive than higher quality foreign alternatives.
In order to succeed, strict protectionism demands the unrealistic expectation that the protectionist country will be able to produce everything its people need or want. In this sense, protectionism is in direct opposition to the reality that a country’s economy will prosper only when its workers are free to specialize at what they do best rather than trying to make the country self-sufficient.
Institutions including the World Bank and the IMF count dozens to hundreds of factors that have a statistically relevant impact on growth, including everything from the share of university students who are studying law to “ethno- linguistic fractionalization,” and whether the country in question is a former Spanish colony.
These are the basic principles: Avoid straight-line forecasting and foggy discussions of the coming century. Be skeptical of sweeping single-factor theories. Stifle biases of all kinds, be they political, cultural or “anchoring.” Avoid falling for the assumption that the recent past is prologue for the distant future, and remember that churn and crisis are the norm. Recognize that any economy, no matter how successful or how broken, is more likely to return to the long-term average growth rate for its income class than to remain abnormally hot (or cold) indefinitely. Watch for balanced growth, and focus on a manageable set of dynamic indicators that make it possible to anticipate turns in the cycle.
Growth can be defined as the sum of spending by government, spending by consumers, and investment to build factories or homes, buy computers and other equipment, and otherwise build up the nation. Investment typically represents a much smaller share of the economy than consumption, often around 20 percent, but it is the most important indicator of change, because booms and busts in investment typically drive recessions and recoveries. In the United States, for example, investment is six times more volatile than consumption,
Growth can also be broken down as the sum of production in various industries, such as farming, services, and manufacturing. Of these, manufacturing has been declining worldwide—it’s now less than 18 percent of global GDP, down from more than 24 percent in 1980—but it is still the most significant force of change, because it has traditionally been the main source of jobs, innovation, and increases in productivity.
Investing in education is often seen as a sacred obligation, like defending motherhood, and too few questions are asked about whether it is getting the job done. In some countries huge expenditures on the university system have had almost no economic impact, even over the long term. The emerging nation in which the population has the highest average years of schooling (11.5) and the largest share of university grads (6.4 percent) is Russia, where the Soviet era legacy of excellence in science and technology education has yet to affect the economy. Russia is still dependent on raw materials, and although it has a few dynamic Internet companies, it lacks a tech sector to speak of and has been one the world’s slowest-growing economies in the 2010s.
For example, education is everyone’s favorite way to boost the talent of the labor force and raise productivity, but my rules pay little attention to it. The payoff from investment in education is so slow and variable that it is almost useless as a predictor of economic change over a five-to-ten-year period. Many studies have linked the post–World War II booms in the United States and Britain to the advent of mass public education, but that change began before World War I.
In many postwar cases the economy took off in educationally backward nations like Taiwan and South Korea. As the Asia expert Joe Studwell has pointed out, in Taiwan 55 percent of the population was illiterate in 1945, and that share was still high at 45 percent in 1960. South Korea in 1950 had literacy levels comparable to Ethiopia’s. In China, as the economy took off in the 1980s, local officials spent heavily on roads, factories, and other investments that had a fast impact on growth, because their careers depended on producing high growth numbers immediately. Schools came later.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report focuses on twelve basic categories, but many are slow-moving forces like institutions and education. Finland, for example, has been near the top of the forum’s ranking system for a long time, and in 2015 it ranked fourth in the world and first in a dozen subcategories ranging from primary schools to antimonopoly policies. Finland was also the survey’s top-ranked European Union country. Yet it suffered one of the slowest recoveries from the crisis of 2008, far behind the United States, Germany, and Sweden, and was about on par with the hardest-hit countries of southern Europe. Finland was paying the price for having let its debts and wages rise quickly and for its heavy dependence on exports of timber and other raw materials at a time when global prices for these commodities was collapsing. Having good primary schools was no defense for Finland when more important forces of change were at work.
Another simple way to define economic growth is as the sum of the hours that people work plus their output per hour or productivity. But productivity is hard to measure, and the results are subject to constant revision and debate. On the other hand, the number of hours people work reflects growth in the workforce, which is driven by population growth, which is relatively easy to count. Unlike economic forecasts, population forecasts depend on a few simple factors—mainly fertility and longevity— and have a strong record for accuracy.
