Who Is Responsible for the Truth?

The debate over the creation of new administrative units and provinces in Pakistan has once again occupied the national discourse after Federal Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi declared that the country’s existing governance system had “collapsed” and argued that governance must be brought closer to the people through new administrative units. His remarks have revived an issue that has periodically surfaced since independence but has rarely moved beyond political rhetoric. While some interpreted his statement as a call for creating additional provinces, others argued that he was advocating broader administrative restructuring. Regardless of terminology, the debate has exposed the structural weaknesses of Pakistan’s governance architecture and compelled policymakers, constitutional experts and political parties to revisit an important question: can Pakistan continue to be governed effectively under its existing administrative framework, or has demographic growth, urban expansion and governance complexity made institutional restructuring unavoidable?  Pakistan today is home to more than 250 million people, yet it continues to function primarily through four provinces established under historical rather than administrative considerations. At independence in 1947, the population and governance challenges were dramatically different. Since then, urbanisation, economic diversification, internal migration and increasing demands for public services have transformed governance requirements. Provincial capitals often remain geographically and administratively distant from citizens living in peripheral districts. Residents of South Punjab, Hazara, southern Balochistan, merged districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and interior Sindh frequently complain that decision-making remains concentrated in provincial capitals, resulting in unequal development, delayed service delivery and inadequate representation. Mohsin Naqvi’s argument rests on the proposition that governance has become excessively centralised and that citizens are compelled to travel long distances merely to access basic government services, courts and administrative offices. He further argued that countries with expanding populations have responded by creating additional administrative units rather than maintaining outdated structures. Whether one agrees with his assessment or not, his central observation deserves serious consideration because governance effectiveness is measured not by the size of government but by the accessibility, responsiveness and accountability of institutions.  The debate itself is not new. Successive governments have proposed South Punjab Province, Bahawalpur Province, Hazara Province and even administrative restructuring in Karachi and Balochistan. Parliamentary resolutions regarding South Punjab have previously been adopted, yet constitutional consensus has remained elusive. Political parties have often supported new provinces while in opposition but have shown considerably less enthusiasm after assuming power. Consequently, proposals have become election slogans rather than governance reforms.  Critics of creating new provinces argue that administrative fragmentation alone cannot solve governance failures. They point out that Pakistan’s primary problem is not necessarily the number of provinces but weak institutions, bureaucratic inefficiency, political interference, corruption and inconsistent implementation of laws. According to this perspective, multiplying provinces without institutional reform merely replicates existing inefficiencies across additional administrative boundaries. New provincial governments would require assemblies, governors, chief ministers, secretariats, police structures, judicial infrastructure and enormous recurring financial expenditures. Unless accompanied by governance reforms, decentralisation may simply increase administrative costs without improving public service delivery. Supporters, however, contend that administrative proximity improves governance outcomes. Comparative international experience demonstrates that countries such as India have periodically reorganised states to improve administrative efficiency and political representation. Smaller administrative jurisdictions often enable faster decision-making, improved monitoring, stronger accountability and more equitable distribution of development resources. Citizens generally experience better governance when government institutions are physically and administratively closer to them. These arguments have gained renewed attention following Naqvi’s intervention.  However, the current debate suffers from one significant omission. It largely ignores Pakistan’s weakest democratic institution: local government. Before creating additional provinces, policymakers must honestly evaluate why local governments have repeatedly failed. Pakistan has experimented with local government systems under different constitutional and political arrangements, yet these institutions have rarely been allowed to function independently and consistently. Elected local governments are frequently dissolved, elections are delayed and financial autonomy remains severely restricted. Provincial governments often resist devolving meaningful authority because local governments are perceived as political competitors rather than governance partners. This brings the issue of local body elections to the centre of the discussion. The Constitution envisions democratic decentralisation, yet local government elections have remained irregular across several provinces. In many cases, elected councils complete only partial terms or remain financially dependent upon provincial governments. Consequently, citizens seeking municipal services, sanitation, water supply, local roads, building regulation or community development frequently confront administrative paralysis. A country that struggles to sustain functioning local governments cannot realistically expect that merely creating additional provinces will automatically improve governance. The experience of Pakistan’s devolution reforms provides valuable lessons. The Local Government reforms introduced in the early 2000s attempted to decentralise authority by empowering districts and local councils. Although those reforms had weaknesses and generated political controversy, they demonstrated that bringing government closer to citizens can improve responsiveness when accompanied by fiscal authority, administrative autonomy and institutional accountability. Unfortunately, subsequent governments reversed or weakened many of these arrangements, resulting in repeated cycles of centralisation and decentralisation. Political reactions to Mohsin Naqvi’s proposal reflect Pakistan’s broader constitutional divisions. Some leaders have welcomed discussion on governance reform while supporting greater administrative decentralisation. Others have questioned both the timing and constitutional implications of the proposal, expressing concerns that restructuring provinces without broad political consensus could intensify ethnic, linguistic and regional sensitivities. There are also concerns that debates over provincial boundaries could distract attention from more immediate governance priorities, including economic recovery, inflation, institutional reforms and electoral credibility. The political diversity of these reactions demonstrates that constitutional restructuring cannot succeed through executive statements alone; it requires sustained parliamentary dialogue, provincial participation and national consensus.  The constitutional dimension cannot be overlooked. Creating new provinces requires constitutional amendments and political agreement among federal and provincial stakeholders. Such reforms inevitably involve questions relating to resource distribution, National Finance Commission allocations, Senate representation, civil service restructuring, judicial jurisdictions and provincial assets. Therefore, any attempt to redraw administrative boundaries without extensive consultation risks generating political instability rather than administrative efficiency. The opportunities nevertheless remain significant. Properly designed administrative restructuring could reduce regional disparities, improve public service delivery, enhance

The preceding five parts of this series have argued that elimination of riba cannot be achieved by changing the vocabulary of finance. We began with definition, moved to creation of money, separated transaction deposits from investment capital, examined productive finance based on ownership and genuine risk, and then placed Bait-ul-Mal, waqf, zakat and qard hasan within a wider system of social protection. The final question is no longer conceptual. It is legislative. Pakistan now has a date. The Constitution (Twenty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2024 substituted Article 38(f) with the direction to “eliminate riba completely before the first day of January, two thousand twenty-eight”. The constitutional deadline reinforces the Federal Shariat Court’s 2022 judgment in the Riba cases, reported as PLD 2023 FSC 47. The problem is that a deadline does not itself create a new financial order. The Finance Division’s Post-2027 Financial System in Pakistan contains useful work on Sukuk, liquidity facilities, legislation, safety nets, technology and capacity building. It nevertheless remains a strategy, not a Prohibition of Riba law. More importantly, some of its transitional assumptions sit uneasily with the word “completely”. Majority foreign-owned institutions may decide voluntarily whether to convert; conventional obligations contracted before the deadline may continue according to their terms until maturity; and fresh foreign financing is contemplated through Shariah-compliant modes subject to availability of reasonable options. These concerns are understandable from the perspective of financial stability. They cannot become permanent legal exceptions. Pakistan therefore needs an umbrella Prohibition of Riba Act, enacted well before the constitutional cut-off, accompanied by consequential federal and provincial amendments [Who will draft Riba Prohibition Law? Minute Mirror, April 7, 2026]. Its first task must be the one identified in Part I: define what is prohibited. The law should distinguish a loan or debt carrying a stipulated increase because of time from lawful consideration arising from genuine sale, lease, service, partnership or productive risk. Courts and regulators should be empowered to examine connected contracts as one economic arrangement. A murabaha, ijarah, musharakah or Sukuk should not become immune from scrutiny merely because recognised Islamic terminology appears in its documents. The second requirement is a clear cut-off rule. No bank, financial institution, government agency or other regulated person should be permitted to originate a new interest-bearing financial contract in Pakistan after December 31, 2027. The prohibition must be activity-based, not ownership-based. A transaction cannot change its constitutional character because shareholders of the institution happen to be foreign. This is also the weakness we identified earlier in examining the Government’s strategy paper. Existing liabilities require different treatment. Pakistan cannot simply repudiate sovereign bonds, multilateral obligations or private contracts. That would replace one problem with default, litigation and financial isolation. The law should instead require a complete register of every conventional obligation extending beyond the cut-off: principal, return, maturity, governing law, creditor, refinancing possibility and proposed conversion date. Contracts capable of consensual refinancing should be converted. Those that cannot immediately be altered should continue only under a transparent transitional schedule with definite sunset dates, rather than receiving an indefinite exemption merely because they were signed before 2028. The third issue concerns money itself. Part II argued that commercial-bank money creation is not automatically riba. The power to create purchasing power through credit is nevertheless too important to remain outside reform. Parliament should require a time-bound examination of sovereign transaction money, reserve arrangements and separation of monetary creation from productive financial intermediation. This question should be decided upon economic evidence and institutional consequences, not theological assertion. Part III then demonstrated why payment accounts and investment accounts require legal separation. Money held for immediate payment and nominal safety should not be treated as risk capital. Funds deliberately invested for commercial return should carry transparent exposure to the enterprises and assets from which that return arises. Deposit protection against institutional failure must similarly be distinguished from a State guarantee against every commercial investment loss. The fourth area is productive finance. The law should protect genuine murabaha, ijarah, salam, istisna, musharakah, mudarabah and other permissible arrangements while prescribing minimum standards of ownership, possession, disclosure and risk. Shariah audit should examine economic substance rather than merely documentation. Taxation must also become neutral. Equity participation, leasing and genuine asset transactions should not suffer additional fiscal costs merely because legislation was historically designed around conventional debt. Public finance cannot remain outside this discipline. Government should not treat Sukuk merely as a technique for reproducing conventional borrowing against whatever public assets can be placed in a registry. The official strategy itself proposes an Assets Registry Company and expanded hybrid Sukuk issuance. Sovereign instruments must confer genuine economic rights and corresponding responsibilities rather than provide documentary assets solely to support a predetermined financial return. Fiscal reform is inseparable from elimination of riba. No monetary arrangement can remain sound where governments continuously borrow merely to finance structural deficits. Monetary policy requires the same intellectual honesty. The Government’s strategy envisages Shariah-compliant open-market operations, standing facilities and liquidity arrangements. These are necessary developments, but changing contractual forms will not be enough if their sole objective becomes mechanical reproduction of the existing interest-rate corridor. SBP ultimately needs a transparent post-riba monetary framework explaining liquidity creation and absorption, lender-of-last-resort assistance, foreign-exchange operations and monetary transmission. The fifth element takes us beyond banking altogether. Part V argued that riba flourishes not only because creditors seek gain but also because human beings are compelled by need. A successful transition must therefore strengthen Bait-ul-Mal, professionally governed public waqf lillah, independently administered zakat and revolving qard hasan funds. Essential healthcare, education, disability support and subsistence during genuine incapacity should never become markets for financial extraction. Local cooperative institutions should provide the bridge from protection to participation. The lesson drawn from Rabobank was not that Pakistan should import a Dutch banking model. It was that communities can mobilise their resources and build productive institutions from below. Properly regulated cooperatives can gradually shift economic power away from patrons and concentrated financial interests towards citizens themselves. Governance is consequently as important as Shariah nomenclature. Pakistan

Decolonization is often thought of as the process through which colonized nations became free from foreign rule. Flags changed, colonial governments were removed and national governments were. Political independence was officially given back. Yet political freedom did not always mean intellectual, cultural, linguistic or psychological freedom. In places that were once colonized the structures of colonialism stayed long after the colonizers left. These structures continued through education systems, languages, cultural expectations, literary standards, social organizations, economic systems, media portrayals and inherited ideas about what’s considered knowledge, civilization, intelligence, progress and even beauty. This ongoing influence brings up a question: Can a country really be independent if its people still judge themselves using the intellectual standards of their former rulers? The point of this article is that political decolonization is not complete without the decolonization of the mind. Decolonizing minds does not mean rejecting everything from the West. Does it mean replacing one way of thinking with another? Instead it means looking at the systems of knowledge that have been passed down, finding voices that have been ignored, acknowledging indigenous ways of thinking, challenging language and culture hierarchies and building confidence to create knowledge based on one’s own history and society while still being open to global ideas. The idea of the “colonization of the mind” is very important because colonialism was not about politics or money. Colonial powers often tried to show that their language, literature, religion, schools, social systems and ways of knowing were better than those of the people they ruled. The people who were colonized were. Sometimes forced to believe that the culture of the colonizers was modern while their own traditions were backward. The result was a system where the colonized person started to see themselves through the eyes of the people who ruled them. Frantz Fanon in his books about the psychology of colonialism showed how colonial control gets into the minds of the people who are oppressed. So colonialism does not end because the person in charge leaves. Its biggest success happens when its ideas and beliefs become part of the colonized person’s thinking. The mental impact of colonialism is one of its lasting effects. A colonized mind may feel ashamed of its language, accent, literature, clothing, history, traditions and ways of thinking. It may think that foreign things are advanced and local things are outdated. A student may think that an English source is automatically more important than a source from their country that is just as good. A university may value ideas from Europe or North America while not giving attention to ideas from Africa, Asia, Latin America or native communities. A society may celebrate culture while thinking its own traditions are old-fashioned. These views are not always because of individuals; they are often the result of historical systems that have taught generations what to admire and what to ignore. Education is one of the important places where decolonization needs to happen. Colonial education systems were often built not to help the people they ruled but to serve the needs of the rulers. Even though schools today have changed a lot, many still repeat the ways of knowing. The lessons may focus on history, Western books, European philosophy and Western science while giving little space to local knowledge and traditions. This does not mean that Shakespeare, Aristotle, Kant, Newton or other great thinkers should be removed from the lessons. That would only replace one kind of exclusion with another. The real goal is to have balance. Students should read Shakespeare along with writers from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and other areas. They should study philosophy while also learning about philosophies from Asia, Africa, the Islamic world and native communities. The purpose is not to get rid of knowledge but to make the learning more wide. A decolonized class asks tough questions about who has been allowed to create knowledge. Who writes history? Who is considered important in literature? Whose language is seen as academic? Whose knowledge is seen as scientific? Whose view defines life? These questions show the politics of knowledge. Knowledge is never made in a vacuum. Schools, universities, publishers, governments, colonial systems and international groups have often decided which types of knowledge are accepted. Decolonization means we have to see these systems and think about them carefully or just accept them as better. Language is possibly the obvious place where intellectual decolonization needs to happen. Colonial languages like English, French, Spanish and Portuguese still hold positions in many countries that used to be colonized. English in particular has become a language and gives access to international learning, technology, jobs, diplomacy and higher education. So the argument for decolonization can’t just be to stop using English. That would be unrealistic. Might even hurt students who need to speak English to communicate internationally. A better argument is to have languages. English should be seen as one tool, not a measure of smartness, civilization or social value. In countries where many languages are spoken, local languages carry histories, memories, identities, oral stories, cultural knowledge and different ways of looking at the world. When a language is pushed aside an entire system of thinking can be weakened. Losing a language is not just losing words; it can also lose knowledge about nature, stories, cultural memory, native words and community identity. Decolonizing the mind means people need to see that speaking a language does not make someone less educated and speaking English does not automatically make someone more intelligent. Knowing a language and being smart are things. A person can be very educated and still express themselves best in a language. At the time, decolonization should not make people dislike English or other global languages. English has been taken by writers, scholars, activists and thinkers from countries and used to show their own experiences. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and many others have shown ways to use colonial languages. Their work shows that language can

One question stayed with me long after I attended a workshop under the project titled ‘Digital Trust and Free Expression in the Era of AI’, organized by the Department of Media and Development Communication, University of the Punjab with the support of the U.S. Mission to Pakistan in partnership with the Pakistan-U.S. Alumni Network, was, ‘How will we preserve digital trust and free expression in the age of AI’? As AI becomes an integral part of digital journalism, the question is no longer whether it should be used, and more importantly who should be held responsible when things go wrong. Artificial Intelligence has definitely proven to be a powerful tool for journalists. It can summarize long reports, translate content into multiple languages, follow breaking news, analyze vast quantities of data and even write complete news reports in seconds. All of these capabilities have revolutionized newsroom processes and enabled journalists to process information more efficiently than ever before. But efficiency is not the only measure of ethical journalism. Journalism isn’t about being fast, it’s about informing the public accurately, fairly and responsibly. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from the workshop was that AI does not understand information; it predicts the most likely response based on patterns in the data it has learned from. This distinction is important because when reliable information is unavailable at the time, AI generates responses that seem convincing but inaccurate, but are wrong, which is often referred to as AI hallucination. What’s most concerning is that the AI generated mistakes can appear convincing enough for people to accept them as true. This poses an ethical question: Who should be held responsible if AI-generated news contains misleading information? The burden can’t be placed entirely on the algorithm. AI has no moral judgement or legal accountability. It cannot distinguish between public interest and public harm and is not aware of the social consequences of publishing inaccurate information. This means that the responsibility rests with those who decide to employ these technologies: journalists, editors, newsroom leaders, and media organizations. While AI can help create content, it cannot replace responsibility. This is where ethics become more important than technological advancements. Checking information should not take a back seat to the ‘Publish first’ mentality. With all of the digital platforms that exist today, misinformation can spread from continent to continent within minutes and corrections often fail to reach the same audience. Each unverified headline altered photo or AI-generated mistake can damage the public’s trust, both in a specific news organization and in journalism.   The discussions also reinforced the importance of Media and Information Literacy (MIL). Verification is not only the responsibility of journalists, but also something that is necessary for every digital citizen. Learning how to use reverse image search, source verification techniques, and critical evaluation of online information is no longer an option, it’s essential for protecting ourselves from deception. As AI-generated content becomes increasingly sophisticated, it is essential to verify information before accepting it as true. AI will continue to evolve and so will digital journalism. The challenge is not innovation itself but using it responsibly. Trust is not something algorithms can build, it is something that can be gained only through transparency, accountability and a steadfast dedication to truth. While adopting new technologies to do journalism, let’s not forget that the tools should enhance journalism’s values, not shape journalism. AI may help write the news, but only humans can uphold the ethics behind it. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Mission to Pakistan or USEFP.

By Dr. Shahzad Ali Gill There are two numbers Pakistan’s policymakers should learn to say in the same breath. The first is USD 100 billion, which the Ministry of Maritime Affairs (MoMA) believes the blue economy could be worth every year if the country’s coastline, fisheries, shipping lanes and offshore basins were properly developed. The second is USD 5.8 bn, what a single badly handled investment agreement, in a mining project nowhere near the sea, once cost the national exchequer in an international arbitration award. Until we learn to think about these two numbers together, the first will remain a slogan and the second will remain a warning we keep failing to heed. Pakistan’s maritime endowment is not in question. The country has a coastline of 1,001 kilometres along Sindh and Balochistan, and an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of 240,000 square kilometres, expanded by a further 50,000 square kilometres continental shelf claim that the United Nations approved back in 2015. And yet, by the MoMA’s own reckoning, the blue economy, shipping, fisheries, offshore energy, coastal tourism and the activity that clusters around them contribute barely 0.4 per cent to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or about USD 1bn a year. The same ministry has set its sights on USD 100 bn annually through “Maritime@100”, a roadmap to reach that target by 2047, at a time when the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) projects the global ocean economy will exceed USD 3 trillion by 2030. According to the 2026 report of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the ocean trade has already reached USD 2.5 tn in 2025. The gap between what Pakistan has and what it is leaving on the table is, by any measure, enormous. Closing that gap will not happen through speeches. It will happen, almost entirely, through two unglamorous legal instruments that include concession agreements and implementation agreements. A concession agreement grants a private party the right to finance, build, and operate a public asset – a port, most often – for a fixed term in exchange for tariffs or a share of revenue, with the asset reverting to the state once the term ends, a model commonly called build-operate-transfer or build-own-operate-transfer (BOT/BOOT). An implementation agreement works differently. It is a direct undertaking between the government and a project company, sitting alongside a commercial contract such as a power purchase agreement (PPA), through which the state offers sovereign guarantees, regulatory consents and tax assurances without handing over rights to any public asset. Every deep-sea port, LNG terminal, and offshore drilling concession Pakistan signs over the next two decades will be built on one or the other. That is precisely why getting their terms right matters the most. What Gwadar already taught us We do not need to imagine how this plays out; we have Gwadar. The original Gwadar Port Concession Agreement, signed in 2007 between the Gwadar Port Authority (GPA) and a foreign operator, Singapore Port Authority (SPA), and later transferred to the China Overseas Ports Holding Company (COPHC) in 2013, carried a 20-year corporate tax exemption and a government revenue share of 9% of port income plus 15% from the adjoining Special Economic Zone (SEZ). That should have been the ceiling. Instead, between 2015 and 2020, the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the cabinet extended the income tax holiday to 23 years, widened it to cover contractors and sub-contractors as well, and granted the 923-hectare Gwadar Free Zone a land lease running up to 99 years. Each renegotiation made the deal more generous to the investor, never less. That is the pattern to watch for since the concessions in Pakistan rarely tighten once signed. They only ever loosen. This should trouble us more than it does, because Article 77 of the Constitution reserves the power to levy federal taxes exclusively for Parliament. Yet most of these concession-era tax holidays and customs exemptions are not legislated at all; they arrive through Statutory Regulatory Orders (SROs) and amendments to existing tax schedules, executive instruments that nonetheless bind the state for 20 to 40 years at a stretch. And Gwadar is not the exception; it is the template. The number of special economic zones (SEZs) has surged from seven to 44, under the second phase of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), carrying broadly similar concession packages. Every one of them represents a slice of fiscal sovereignty quietly signed away by the executive, on terms that no future Parliament will find easy to unwind. The warning we already received If Gwadar shows how concessions deepen, Reko Diq shows what happens when they collapse, and although it is a mining dispute, not a maritime one, the lesson is structural, not sectoral. After Balochistan denied a mining lease to the Tethyan Copper Company (TCC) in 2011 and the Supreme Court of Pakistan voided the underlying exploration agreement in 2013, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) ruled against Pakistan in 2019 under the Pakistan-Australia Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), awarding damages of roughly USD 5.8 bn, one of the largest sums in the history of ICSID. A separate dispute brought by the Turkish power producer Karkey under the Pakistan-Turkey BIT had already cost the country USD 760 million the year before. Both were eventually settled out of court. Reko Diq in 2022, with Barrick Gold taking a 50 per cent stake alongside federal state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the Balochistan government, each holding 25%, but the exposure that produced those numbers in the first place has not gone away. Every offshore exploration block, port concession, and LNG agreement Pakistan signs carries almost the same treaty protections and the same risk of ending up before the same arbitration tribunals. The other half of the bargain There is a second risk that rarely gets discussed alongside the first. The Foreign Exchange Manual issued by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), 1947, governs how the profits, dividends, and disinvestment proceeds promised under these agreements can actually leave the country.

The recently published PRIME Plus report, An Assessment of the FY2026–27 Federal Budget Through the Lens of Economic Freedom, deserves appreciation for shifting the debate beyond conventional budget arithmetic. Rather than asking merely whether taxes have increased or decreased, it examines whether the budget enlarges or restricts the freedom of individuals and businesses to produce, invest, trade and innovate. That alone makes it a valuable contribution to Pakistan’s policy discourse. The report of Policy Research Institute of Market Economy (PRIME) correctly observes that Pakistan’s formal economy bears a disproportionate tax burden while much of the informal sector remains outside the effective tax net. It questions tax expenditures exceeding Rs 2.35 trillion, highlights the crowding out of private investment by government borrowing, welcomes tariff rationalisation and criticises regulatory uncertainty. These issues deserve much wider public attention. PRIME’s analysis also points towards a deeper weakness in Pakistan’s reform discourse: we discuss economic freedom without first securing constitutional governance. The distinction is fundamental. International indices commonly measure economic freedom through taxation, trade openness, government spending, financial markets and regulatory efficiency. These indicators matter. Lower barriers to enterprise can promote investment, innovation and competition. They answer only part of the question. Why do countries with similar tax rates produce very different economic outcomes? Why do investors accept higher taxation in some jurisdictions while avoiding countries with lighter tax burdens? Why do some economies flourish with relatively large governments while others stagnate despite repeated concessions? The answer lies primarily in institutions. James Buchanan argued that public finance cannot be analysed independently of the constitutional rules under which governments operate. Douglass North demonstrated that long-term development depends upon institutions that reduce uncertainty, enforce contracts and create predictable incentives. Centuries earlier, Ibn Khaldun linked prosperity with justice, moderation in taxation and restraint upon arbitrary power. Excessive intervention, unpredictable fiscal demands and rent-seeking, he observed, ultimately weaken both economic activity and state revenues. These intellectual traditions converge on one central proposition: economic freedom is not created simply by lowering tax rates. It emerges from constitutional governance. Pakistan’s experience illustrates this clearly. Successive governments have offered tax holidays, created special economic zones, reduced customs duties and announced investment facilitation mechanisms. Investment nevertheless remains subdued. Investors do not merely compare tax rates; they compare legal systems. They ask whether contracts will be enforced within a reasonable time, whether regulations will survive political transitions, whether tax liabilities can be altered retrospectively and whether executive discretion outweighs parliamentary certainty. These are questions of constitutional governance rather than fiscal engineering. The same principle applies to taxation. Pakistan’s problem is frequently described as one of high taxation. That diagnosis is incomplete. The deeper problem is unequal taxation. The salaried class in formal sector is fully documented, its tax is deducted before income reaches employees, and its compliance burden continues to rise. Large segments of commerce, services and agriculture operate under very different fiscal realities. The issue is not merely how much tax is collected, but whether equal citizens are governed by equal fiscal rules. A system built around withholding taxes, presumptive taxes, minimum taxes and sector-specific exemptions creates unequal citizenship before the law. It also encourages informality. Businesses do not remain undocumented only because rates are high. Formal participation imposes greater compliance costs while offering few institutional benefits. Documentation without trust becomes compulsion rather than reform. The PRIME report also notes that government borrowing crowds out private investment because banks prefer sovereign lending over commercial risk. This is not simply a banking failure. When governments repeatedly finance deficits through domestic borrowing, banks act rationally by purchasing government securities. Financial markets are responding to distorted fiscal incentives created by public policy. Interest payments and defence together consume nearly 94 percent of net federal revenue, leaving little fiscal space for education, healthcare, scientific research, digital infrastructure, justice administration and productive public investment. The challenge is not merely that government spends too much; it is that public priorities have become distorted. Expenditure that strengthens courts, education, digital infrastructure, research, public health and efficient regulation expands future economic freedom because it reduces uncertainty and lowers transaction costs. Spending absorbed by debt servicing and institutional inefficiency does not. Constitutional Political Economy therefore distinguishes between the size of government and the quality of government. Fiscal federalism is another neglected dimension. The Constitution (Eighteenth Amendment) Act, 2010 reshaped the distribution of fiscal powers. Provincial sales taxes, fragmented administrations and overlapping jurisdictions now influence business decisions daily. Economic freedom cannot be assessed through the federal budget alone. The constitutional structure governing taxation matters as much as the annual Finance Act itself. Pakistan’s economic challenge is consequently larger than budget reform. Markets flourish where laws are predictable, taxation is neutral, contracts are enforceable, property rights are secure and governments remain subject to constitutional restraints. These conditions cannot be created through a single Finance Act. They require a durable commitment to constitutional governance. The value of the PRIME report lies in encouraging this broader conversation. The next step is to recognise that economic freedom rests upon a stronger constitutional foundation. Where constitutional governance is weak, economic reforms remain temporary. Where it is strong, markets can generate prosperity without constant discretionary intervention. Pakistan’s recurring fiscal crises are symptoms rather than the disease. The underlying ailment is institutional. Budgets can redistribute resources, but only constitutional governance can establish equality before law, predictable taxation, secure property rights and meaningful limits on arbitrary state power. Economic freedom, therefore, is neither the starting point of development nor a concession to be distributed through annual Finance Acts. It is the outcome of a constitutional order in which taxation rests on representation, public borrowing is subject to accountability, contracts and property are protected, and executive power remains bounded by law. In a rent-distributing state, freedom is rationed through exemptions, influence and discretion; in a constitutional state, it is secured for all through equal rules. Unless Pakistan reforms the institutions that determine who is taxed, how public money is spent, who bears the cost of debt and how state power is