Inaugural Address

At the outset let me thank Professor Hashmi for his kind wordsabout me in the welcome address. It is a matter of great pleasure for meto inaugurate this conference. I congratulate the Pakistan Society ofDevelopment Economists on organising its 16th Annual Conference withsuch wide and distinguished participation. The conference’s theme“Growth, Poverty and Decentralisation” is highly relevant for Pakistanin view of the urgent need to pull the country out of the vicious circleof poverty and indebtedness. I hope this Conference will come up withconcrete recommendations to strengthen the economy by addressing theissues confronting us in this matter. The importance of economy in theemerging global scene cannot be overemphasised. A country’s sovereignty,political stability and diplomatic weightage largely depend upon itsstate of economy. Pakistan can take genuine pride in its achievementssince 1947. We started from the scratch and today we are proud to be thefirst Islamic country and 7th in the world to become a nuclear power.Our industrial sector, communication infrastructure and agriculture haveattained reasonable levels of development. However today when we lookback at our achievements, we see that we have not made judicious use ofour scarce resources. We borrowed heavily and went on a spending spreewithout proper planning. Wastage and injudicious use of resourcescoupled with lop-sided planning have now landed us in economic crises.Our debts have become difficult to service, our population growth rateoutpaces our economic growth, and disparities in incomes have increasedthe gap between the rich and the poor.