The Possibilities of the East Pakistan Economy During the Fourth Five-Year Plan

The purpose of the present set of exercises is to study the possibilities of the East Pakistan economy during the fourth five-year plan period (1970-75) with the help of an explicit model. The model we employ is a multisectoral one of the simple consistency type. It is a multisectoral or detailed model for plan¬ning in the sense that it distinguishes as many as twenty-nine producing sectors of the economy of East Pakistan and explicitly takes into account all intersectoral deliveries of current and capital goods. The definite advantages of a multi-sectoral model over its alternative, a highly aggregated model, need hardly be pointed out. Since sectors with widely varying resource-requirements can easily have widely divergent rates of growth, the use of fixed overall incre¬mental capital and foreign-exchange coefficients can hardly be a reliable method of estimating the size of a development programme. Moreover, it is not enough to know the total size of a development programme. From an operational standpoint it is essential to know in some details the pattern of distribution of resources among various types of activities.