Cheating Today, Corruption Tomorrow

When rain descends from the folds of clouds, it assumes the form of divine mercy for the earth—reviving parched soil and spreading smiles across the weary faces of farmers. Yet, when this very rain turns unbridled and the administrative apparatus built to welcome it pulls a heavy shroud of negligence over its eyes, this descent of mercy transforms into a harrowing shape of torment and sudden calamity. Gujrat, a historic and industrial city of Punjab that holds a unique global identity through its civilizational expanse, skilled artisans, and proximity to the Chenab River, presents the terrifying spectacle of a pond and a swamp every monsoon season. Here, urban flooding is no longer merely a climatic accident; rather, it has become a chilling confession of administrative apathy, unscientific planning, and a criminal denial of historical geographical realities. When the hydrological management of cities is evaluated on a global scale, the concepts of “Sponge Cities” are put into practice, but our reality stands in stark opposition. When the state of urban drainage in Gujrat is objectively reviewed through the corridors of history, one’s eyes are opened to the bitter truth that the rulers and elements who dominated this city consciously hollowed out its roots at every level for the gratification of greed. The city’s drainage and sewerage system, in particular, fell prey to the plunder of commission agents belonging to the corruption mafia. It is an immensely agonizing chapter of history that two decades ago, when a renowned international Japanese company completed a detailed survey of Gujrat, officially announced its complete reconstruction on modern lines, and promised a world-class drainage system, the hungry brokers sitting in the echelons of power burnt this magnificent project in the fire of personal lust. The people of Gujrat can never forget the actors who sacrificed the Japanese company’s dream at the altar of kickbacks. Later, when times changed and Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi assumed the helm of this region as Chief Minister, he released heavy, voluminous funds amounting to billions of rupees to radically improve and modernize Gujrat’s decrepit and worn-out drainage system. Yet the tragedy was that these billions of rupees in Gujrat’s history remained restricted to a few specific and powerful pockets, and to openly divide these funds, the entire system was mortgaged to a fostered contractor mafia. With an exceptionally substandard, superficial, and unprofessional approach, this mafia played a game of window-dressing that instead of fixing Gujrat’s sewerage system, ruined it permanently and turned the entire city into an artificial swamp. Today, the agony of drainage dancing through the city’s streets and roads offers no hope of deliverance from this terrifying urban flood unless a severe accountability of these true, deceitful culprits is carried out. The political leadership that followed also made efforts suited to their respective statures for the betterment of the city; and although their own technical errors consistently hampered this improvement, every resident of Gujrat continues to carry the heavy burden of those primary sinners who devastated Gujrat’s history, civilization, and urbanity. Last year, when urban flooding once again descended upon the city as a mortal torment, uproar echoed everywhere, the wheel of life halted, and the situation reached a point where the Chief Minister of Punjab had to personally make an emergency visit to Gujrat to rescue the district administration from this storm of incompetence. During this visit, a heavy downpour of announcements and promises took place, accompanied by the release of special funds worth billions for complete and sustainable improvement next year. Despite the sincere efforts and financial provisions of Honorable Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the district administration—entrenched in a colonial mindset—spent all its energies throughout the year on personal image-building and photo sessions rather than the timely completion of this vital sewerage project. As ill luck would have it, as soon as the monsoon season arrived once again this year, the colorful balloon of good governance and claims deflated entirely, exposing the bitter reality that this malaise of flawed planning persists and rainwater continues to rain down as a torment upon citizens’ lives. And when this rainwater has already devastated citizens’ lives, wounding their homes and businesses, only then do the traditional efforts of WASA and district institutions begin to bear fruit, with water finally receding from the streets after prolonged suffering. Success drums are then beaten over this very temporary performance, adding salt to the injuries of the citizens. A profound study of Gujrat’s urban geography reveals that its foundations and topography are deeply embedded in its centuries-old historical backdrop. Built during the Mughal era, the Akbari Fort serves as the greatest metaphor for the region’s military, political, and administrative history. Viewed from a geographical and topographical standpoint, the Akbari Fort is situated on a relatively high mound or plateau, and the city’s older structural layout spreads outward from this height in gradual slopes in all directions. Principally and naturally, this elevation of the fort and the surrounding natural slopes should have stood as an exceptional geographical blessing for a drainage system—provided the natural pathways of water flow had been preserved and left unmolested by grotesque tampering. The tragedy, however, is that over time, unbridled urban expansion and a flood of encroachments mutilated this natural sloping system so ruthlessly that today, that very height and slope have turned into a bane for the city. Unchecked commercialization and illegal constructions in and around the Akbari Fort and its adjoining low-lying areas have blocked all traditional water routes in such a manner that water finds no outlet. The consequence is that when rainwater flows down from the elevated parts of the fort, instead of finding an open path or paved drain ahead, it encounters dead alleys, narrow sewage pipelines, and an endless siege of encroachments. Consequently, this water accumulates in lower regions to form a permanent lake, leaving city residents weeping over their helplessness. Gujrat’s tragedy is not merely the accumulation of rainwater; it is a reflection of that collective apathy and corruption which wakes up with the arrival

We Were Forewarned, Then Why Are We Drowning, and What Lies Ahead In March, when the glaciers were shedding their winter whites too early and the northern valleys stood bare against a sky that should have held snow, I wrote that the coming monsoon would test us. The National Disaster Management Authority had foreseen rains twenty-two to twenty-six percent heavier than the floods that killed more than a thousand souls the year before. Our embankments were still broken. Our protocols were still asleep. It is late July now. The test has begun. Riverine area dwellers stand at the edge of swollen rivers, watching the water turn from brown to something near black, carrying the upstream soil. There is that familiar murmur of disbelief from government corridors—the same soft gasp that follows every flood, as if the water had not been whispering its arrival for months. But the water does not whisper to those who will not bend their ear. It speaks in the language of saturated earth, and we have heard it before. We have simply chosen, again and again, not to listen. We were forewarned by the agencies. We were forewarned by the science. And we were forewarned by the very land beneath our feet—the old, patient land that absorbed until it could absorb no more, and is now quietly drowning. Yet when the skies opened, we were caught unprepared. And the heavy heart of Bhadoon is still to come. What the Old Farmers Knew For generations, the farmers of the Indus Basin have spoken of Sawan and Bhadoon not as months, but as temperaments. Sawan, the early monsoon of July and mid-August, is the gentle guest who fills the earthen pot. Bhadoon, the late monsoon of August and September, is the guest who arrives heavy with sorrow, and finds the door already swollen shut. There is an old understanding in the villages of Punjab and Sindh: if Sawan has been generous—if the rains have fallen day after day without rest—then Bhadoon must be received with care. Not because Bhadoon brings more rain, but because the earth, by the time Bhadoon arrives, has already absorbed all it can hold. The soil is no longer soil. It is a clay pot filled to the lip, trembling at the brim. The next drop does not nourish. It overflows. Modern science calls this Antecedent Moisture Condition. During a gentle Sawan, the land breathes; the rivers rise slowly, politely. But when the early rains come without pause, the land stops breathing. Its lungs fill with water. What was once a sponge becomes something heavy, something waiting. In dry years, only a fraction of rainfall becomes dangerous runoff. But once the soil is saturated, eighty to ninety-five percent of every new drop becomes immediate floodwater. The sponge has no choice. It must release what it cannot hold. It weeps. Nature does not betray us. It simply does what it has always done. It is we who forget the earth, who build our homes upon its floodplains and then feign surprise when the water remembers its ancient path home. The Water Remembers This is not a new story. The water has told it before, and it has told it gently, and we have not listened. In 1955, the Ravi rose with a roar that split the embankments of Lahore’s periphery. The river had been primed for weeks—day after day of July and August rain had filled the soil until the ground could no longer hold the September deluge. The peak at Madhopur was the highest ever recorded. The city woke to find its edges softened, dissolved, gone. In 1992, the same priming filled Mangla and Tarbela to their brims by mid-August. When the early September rains came, Tarbela’s flood-peak reduction capacity collapsed from thirty percent to two percent. The rest surged into the lower plains, uninvited and sorrowful. The engineers knew what was coming. The farmers had only the sound of the river changing pitch—a sound every old farmer knows, a sound that means it is time to gather the children and climb. In 2022, Sindh became an inland sea. Nearly a meter of rain fell on ground that was already thirty percent wetter than it should have been. The water had nowhere to go but into homes, into fields, into the places where people had built their lives on the quiet assumption that the land would always absorb their troubles. The years that followed did not forgive us. In 2023, the Chenab and Jhelum catchments drank until they were full, and when Bhadoon came heavy in September, communities that had barely recovered from 2022 found themselves underwater again. In 2024, the same quiet sorrow played across Sindh and Balochistan—early rains primed the soil, late rains broke the banks, and the katcha communities woke to find their world softened and dissolved. These were not catastrophes on the scale of 2022, but gentle, persistent reminders that the mechanism does not rest, and that a loaded sponge does not care whether the year is famous or forgotten. Then came 2025. The NDMA’s own reports confirmed what the old farmers could have recited without a single instrument: the rain fell on ground that was already wet. The system had no buffer, no forgiveness, no room for error. One thousand and thirty-seven people died. More than two hundred and seventy-five of them were children. Nearly seven million were affected. Three million displaced. Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand, seven hundred and sixty-three homes damaged or destroyed. These are not estimates. These are the quiet names and numbers of a nation that has grown accustomed to forgetting. Now, in 2026, the NDMA warns of an even more intense monsoon. The early snowmelt has already fed the rivers before the clouds even gathered. The reservoirs are high. The soil is full. The sponge is loaded. And Bhadoon has not yet arrived. The Quiet After the Warning The tragedy of this year is not that we did not know. It is that

(When the water rises, who shows up and who is left waiting?) ‎I live in Sabzazar, a neighborhood in Lahore, Pakistan, but part of my heart is always sitting along the banks of the Moxahala Creek back home in Southeast Ohio. When the water rises in Muskingum County or the Punjab plains, who shows up, and who is left waiting? I live in Sabzazar, a neighborhood in Lahore, Pakistan, but part of my heart is always sitting along the banks of the Moxahala Creek back home in Southeast Ohio. ‎ ‎My mother and brother still live right near South Zanesville, just a stone’s throw from Crooksville. When heavy rains hit Perry and Muskingum counties, I don’t need to be there to know what it looks like. I can picture the heavy, chocolate-brown water backing up into the low spots, the damp chill that settles into a basement, the fears of what if the waters reach a house trailer, and that specific, exhausting smell of river mud that takes weeks to scrub out of porch boards and carpet. The worries of if the home has structural damage.. Halfway across the world in Pakistan, the landscape couldn’t look more different. But when monsoon season swells the rivers across the Punjab, the view from the ground is hauntingly identical. ‎ ‎Standing in a flooded doorway feels the same whether you are in Ohio or Lahore. The quiet shock is the same. The ruin of things you worked years to buy is the same. And the very first instinct is to grab your coat, shovel, a chainsaw and a pair of boots and go check on the elderly woman next door.. Start hauling wet furniture, debris to the curb and giving comfort, food and basics to those in need is entirely universal. Watching both worlds at once makes you look at governance differently. It strips away abstract political jargon and leaves you asking one fundamental question: When a community is hit with a crisis, does its system build capable people who can act, or does it leave them sitting on their hands, waiting for permission to survive? ‎ ‎What a Small Ohio Village Taught Me About Governance ‎ ‎Growing up around South Zanesville and Crooksville, you learn pretty early that small-town life relies on a very specific kind of quiet, distributed agency. ‎Crooksville isn’t a rich town. It’s a hard-working Appalachian village of under 1,500 people. But when the creek overflows, nobody sits around waiting for a press conference out of Washington, D.C., or a mandate from the state capital in Columbus. ‎ ‎The response moves in waves because the connections are already wired: ‎On the local levels we see neighbor checks on neighbor. The volunteer fire department turns on the sirens, pulls out the high-water gear, and starts the door to door knocks. At the County level we have the Perry County 911 dispatch and Emergency Management Agency (EMA) start tracking water levels and routing equipment where it’s needed most. At the State level, If the county gets overwhelmed, pre set legal triggers immediately call in the Ohio EMA or the National Guard. ‎ ‎Government here doesn’t replace the community’s instinct to help itself; it validates it, organizes it, and backs it up with real resources. The system trusts the people on the ground to know their own roads. Here in Pakistan, the human spirit is just as generous, if not more so. The impulse toward hospitality, neighborly charity, and mutual support runs incredibly deep. When disaster strikes, ordinary citizens open their wallets and their homes without a second thought. It’s just what they do… ‎ ‎And Pakistan’s has one of the world’s top class military engineering, a massive national disaster agency (the NDMA), and incredible private charities. The raw capacity is immense. Yet, too often, there is a however a very heartbreaking disconnect between that high-level power and the family standing in ankle deep water in a local neighborhood. An ordinary citizen here once described the country to me using a metaphor I’ve never forgotten: a child that was never allowed to stand on its own feet. An infant isn’t helpless because it lacks potential. It’s helpless because it hasn’t been given the space to build muscle, fall over, adjust its balance, and try again. If an authority figure picks the child up every single time it tries to pull itself up, the child never learns to walk—not from a lack of ability, but because the environment denied it the chance to build strength. ‎ ‎That is how systemic learned dependency takes root: Central authorities assume total control, bypassing local municipal councils. Neighborhoods are given no real budget or authority to fix their own drainage or organize local response teams. And when a flood comes, citizens have no choice but to wait for distant, top-down relief. The authorities look at the waiting crowd and say, “See? The people can’t manage without us.” ‎We witness power centralized even further, deepening the exact helplessness it claims to fix. Over generations, people adapt to the system they are given. If a system rewards waiting for a political patron, people learn to wait for patrons. If it rewards local initiative, communities build habits of self-reliance. It is very easy to blame culture or public apathy for civic passivity, but that misses the point entirely. Culture simply reflects the structural incentives people are given to survive and adapt. It is nature vs nurture and we have a break down when these two things fail to promote a cohesiveness and inclusion of what is a community and what that actually means. ‎ ‎Across the globe, the relationship between state control and citizen participation varies wildly, proving that central authority does not have to mean public powerlessness. In China, a deeply centralized state framework actively structures and expects local neighborhood committees and civil volunteer groups to manage community-level crises. Across much of Europe, comprehensive state safety nets exist alongside highly empowered municipal councils and professionalized local volunteer forces.

Vietnam and Pakistan are often viewed as very different economies, yet they share several important characteristics: large populations, substantial labor forces, strategic geographic locations, sizeable domestic markets and considerable potential in agriculture, manufacturing and services. The more important difference, however, is not simply what the two countries possess, but how effectively they have leveraged those assets into production, exports, investment, foreign exchange and sustained economic growth. The contrast is increasingly visible in the numbers. In 2025, Vietnam’s economy reached approximately $514.7 billion, compared with $407.3 billion for Pakistan, despite Pakistan having more than twice Vietnam’s population. GDP per capita was about $5,066 in Vietnam against $1,596 in Pakistan, while economic growth was 8.0 percent compared with 3.7 percent. Vietnam also attracted FDI equivalent to 4.2 percent of GDP, compared with only 0.5 percent in Pakistan. These figures do not mean that the two countries started from identical circumstances. They do, however, demonstrate the consequences of different approaches to leveraging economic potential.   Vietnam’s transformation began with the Doi Moi reforms in 1986, which gradually moved the economy towards market oriented production and greater integration with international markets. Over the following decades, Vietnam built a growth model around manufacturing, exports, foreign direct investment, infrastructure and participation in global value chains. Trade became one of their principal engine of growth. The scale of this transformation is striking. Vietnam’s merchandise exports reached about $475 billion in 2025, while imports were around $455 billion, producing a trade surplus of approximately $20 billion. Total merchandise trade was therefore close to $930 billion, almost twice the country’s GDP. Manufacturing accounted for nearly 89 percent of exports. This demonstrates the power of economic leverage: labour, infrastructure, foreign investment and imported technology have been combined to produce goods for global markets and generate foreign exchange. The access to US provides a particularly revealing comparison. Vietnam exported approximately $153 billion of goods to the U.S. market in 2025. China, meanwhile, remained its largest source of imports. This reflects Vietnam’s position within regional production networks, where it imports machinery, components and intermediate goods and transforms them into products for export. Vietnam’s experience shows that imports are not necessarily a weakness when they support productive investment and future export capacity. Pakistan’s trade structure remains considerably different. According to the State Bank of Pakistan, goods exports were $32.3 billion in FY2025, while goods imports reached $59.1 billion, resulting in a merchandise trade deficit of $26.8 billion. Services exports were $8.4 billion, including ICT exports of $3.8 billion. The difference becomes even more significant when viewed through the balance of payments. Pakistan recorded a current account surplus of $2.1 billion in FY2025, but workers’ remittances contributed $38.3 billion to the external account. The goods and services trade balance remained in deficit by approximately $29.4 billion. This highlights a fundamental difference between the two economies. Pakistan has been able to stabilize its external account partly through remittances, whereas Vietnam has built a much larger export generating productive base. Remittances are vital for Pakistan, but they cannot substitute for an economy capable of generating foreign exchange through competitive production and exports. The U.S. market further illustrates the gap. The United States is Pakistan’s largest export destination, yet Pakistan’s goods exports to the U.S. are only a small fraction of Vietnam’s. The opportunity therefore exists, but Pakistan has not yet developed the scale, diversification and industrial capacity required to capture a much larger share of the market. The lesson is not simply to increase exports to the United States, but to develop the productive ecosystem that makes sustained export growth possible. Vietnam’s experience also contains an important warning. Its impressive export performance has been driven heavily by foreign invested companies. This has helped Vietnam integrate into global value chains, but it has also created concerns about domestic value addition and linkages between multinational corporations and local firms. The lesson for Pakistan is clear: attracting FDI should not be the final objective. FDI should contribute to technology transfer, supplier development, skills, local procurement and domestic value addition. Pakistan therefore needs to rethink the relationship between imports, investment and exports. Restricting imports may temporarily reduce pressure on the balance of payments, but it does not create competitiveness. Machinery, technology, industrial equipment and productive intermediate goods can expand future production and exports. The objective should be to reduce consumption driven imports while facilitating investment driven imports that strengthen domestic productive capacity. Pakistan’s strategic location linking South Asia with China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran and the Middle East offers major economic opportunities, but infrastructure alone cannot deliver transformation. CPEC, Gwadar, economic corridors, industrial zones and digital connectivity must be linked with productive clusters, reliable energy, logistics, skills and international markets. Pakistan should leverage its existing strengths by moving agriculture towards processing and higher value exports, textiles towards design and technical products, minerals towards processing and value addition, and IT, engineering, pharmaceuticals, tourism and business services towards stronger export performance. Pakistan also needs to make exports a central objective of economic policy. Balance of payments stability cannot depend indefinitely on remittances, external borrowing and periodic financial assistance. FDI policy should focus on quality rather than simply quantity, with incentives linked to technology transfer, local supplier development, skills, domestic value addition and exports. Special economic zones should be developed around clearly identified industries and markets, supported by reliable infrastructure and efficient regulation. CPEC, ports, industrial zones, roads and digital infrastructure should function as integrated production and trade systems rather than isolated projects. Public private partnerships can help mobilize investment where projects are economically and financially viable. The central lesson from Vietnam is that economic success depends on leveraging existing advantages through strong institutions, policy continuity and effective coordination. Pakistan has a large market, substantial workforce, strategic geography, natural resources and access to major markets. The priority should be to convert these assets into productivity, exports, investment and sustainable foreign exchange earnings. Pakistan must turn geography into connectivity, population into productive human capital, resources into value added exports, infrastructure into industrial capacity

The previous part VIII of this series concluded that a just tax system must satisfy more than the requirements of arithmetic. It must rest upon legislative competence, representative consent, rational classification, due process, protection against arbitrary deprivation, transparent expenditure and effective remedies. Parliament, while levying taxes cannot constitutionalise injustice merely by enacting it. Pakistan’s fiscal crisis will not be resolved by asking citizens to finance an unreformed state through increasingly coercive instruments. A recent book by Dr Hafiz A. Pasha, Fatima Malik and Hafsa Tanveer, Pakistan: Reforming an Inefficient and Inequitable Tax System, provides an appropriate opportunity to carry that argument forward. The volume is ambitious, data-rich and deserving of serious attention. Few recent studies attempt, within a single work, to map federal and provincial taxation, estimate tax gaps through different methodologies, examine incidence across income groups and sectors, evaluate fiscal incentives and finally present a quantified reform programme. Its central diagnosis is familiar but supported by extensive empirical work. Pakistan combines high statutory rates with a low tax-to-GDP ratio, excessive dependence on indirect taxation, pervasive evasion, severe sectoral disparities and weak provincial revenue mobilisation. The authors propose reforms that, in their estimation, can increase the national tax-to-GDP ratio by approximately three percentage points by 2027–28. The principal difficulty lies not in what the book measures. It lies in what the framework of measurement necessarily leaves outside its calculations. The usefulness—and limits—of the tax-gap lens The organising idea of the book is the tax gap. Through cross-country regressions, a representative-tax-system approach, monetary estimates of evasion and bottom-up calculations, the authors conclude that Pakistan possesses the potential to collect approximately three percent of GDP more in taxes. This is analytically valuable. It also risks converting a constitutional and political problem into an accounting exercise. A tax gap is not necessarily a reservoir of revenue waiting to be collected. Parts of it may reflect privileges protected by influential groups. Other parts arise from low productivity, fragmented enterprises, unemployment, weak financial inclusion and the regulatory costs created by the state itself. Informality is not always a voluntary choice made for the purpose of evasion; it can also be a survival strategy in an economy where formalisation invites multiple taxes, withholding obligations, inspections and compliance costs without ensuring reliable public services. Citizens also judge taxation in relation to expenditure. Their reluctance cannot be understood solely as non-compliance when additional revenue appears likely to finance debt servicing, administrative expansion, elite concessions, loss-making state enterprises and politically negotiated subsidies rather than education, healthcare, transport, security of property and equal economic opportunity. The decisive question is consequently not only how much more can be collected. It is who controls the state, who bears its burdens, who receives its rents, and why technically sound reforms repeatedly fail. Public finance asks how the gap should be closed. Constitutional Political Economy asks why the beneficiaries of the existing arrangement would permit it to be closed fairly. The selective fiscal state The book repeatedly recognises the presence of powerful vested interests. It identifies the under-taxation of property, agriculture, wholesale and retail trade, real estate and parts of the services sector. At the same time, it finds a disproportionate burden upon large-scale manufacturing, banking and formal businesses. Its estimate that industry bears taxes equivalent to 23.8 percent of its value added, with the incidence on large-scale manufacturing exceeding 36 percent, is particularly revealing. These figures demonstrate that Pakistan does not suffer from a uniformly low-tax equilibrium. Pakistan has created a selective fiscal state: coercive towards visible and organised taxpayers, accommodating towards politically protected or administratively difficult constituencies. This conclusion should change the design of reform. Where political influence determines the tax structure, another catalogue of proposed rates and bases cannot alter the equilibrium by itself. Reform must address the rules through which fiscal choices are made, concessions are granted and enforcement is selectively applied. A technically perfect proposal remains politically irrelevant when those who must enact it derive power from the arrangements it seeks to dismantle. Withholdingisation is not income taxation The book correctly notes that withholding and advance taxes generate overwhelming part of total income-tax revenue and have failed to eliminate evasion. It also recognises the distortions created by presumptive/mimum taxation and the fragmentation of income into separately taxed blocs. The consequences are more serious than those of an imperfect collection technique. Withholdingisation represents the gradual abandonment of income taxation as a levy on net accretion to economic power. Banks, utility companies, telecom operators, employers, import authorities, registrars and purchasers have been converted into unpaid tax collectors. Gross transactions are taxed without determining actual income, allowable expenditure, losses or the taxpayer’s real capacity to contribute. The revenue authority obtains money without developing the institutional capacity to examine accounts, conduct intelligent audits and establish taxable income. Compliant businesses suffer liquidity costs and wait for adjustments or refunds, while informal and influential sectors remain beyond meaningful assessment. The reform of income taxation must restore the return, assessment and audit as its foundations. Withholding should remain confined to situations where it is a genuine advance payment—principally salaries, dividends, profit on debt and payments to non-residents (mostly covered under tax treaties). It should remain fully adjustable against the final liability. A system based upon extracting money from every visible transaction may achieve collection targets. It cannot be described as a coherent income tax. Contradictions within the reform programme The book advocates broad-basing and criticises presumptive taxation, but later recommends restoration of a one-percent fixed tax on export proceeds. It supports neutrality while proposing a general five-year tax holiday for investment, enhanced deductions for energy costs and other selective allowances. These proposals arise from genuine concerns. Pakistan’s investment rate remains dangerously low, exporters face high energy and financing costs, and industry competes under an unstable exchange-rate and tariff environment. The proposed remedies nevertheless risk recreating the same exceptionalism that has made Pakistan’s tax system discriminatory, unpredictable and vulnerable to lobbying. A fixed tax on export proceeds is not a tax on income. It taxes turnover