Getting More Out of the PSDP through Results Based Management (Policy)

Since the first Five Year Plan, Pakistan’s development policy has been modelled around the development philosophy of Dr. Mahboob Ul Haq and the Harvard Advisory Group (HAQ/HAG). As a result, the key features of the country’s policy over the past six decades, as summarised by Haque (2020), 1 have revolved around: (1) A focus on building physical infrastructure through discrete projects of sectors in the economy, with infrastructure having a share of about 80 percent in the PSDP. (2) Planning to develop medium term budget to finance sectoral hardware. (3) Seeking foreign aid to meet financing gap in the plan given an expected shortfall in domestic savings. This approach has led to: (1) An excessive focus on “brick and mortar” development. (2) Fragmented projects as Planning Commission was weakened by repeated BoP crises and resorting to IMF programmes. (3) Weakening standards on project development implementation and cost – due to increased politicisation.