THE recent appointment of a banker as the country’s finance minister is rather disappointing. It has nothing to do with the individual concerned. It is because we have been there before and the track record suggests that bankers in this specific role have not served the cause of Pakistan well.

Their orientation is related to the markets and its elite. Despite encoura-ging short-term buoyancy in the economy from fiscal stimuli, the long-term consequences, particularly in the debt burden, both local and foreign, have now brought the country to its knees.

And while the majority of the popu- lation is suffering from adverse headwinds in managing their family lives, commercial banks have declared obscene profits. The richest of the rich have got even richer, and many of them have shifted significant portion of their wealth from the country to safer havens abroad.

The most successful finance czars of modern times have been Manmohan Singh next door and Larry Summers in the United States during Bill Clinton’s tenure. Both economists were from the academia.

Yanis Varoufakis also comes to mind as the finance minister with an academic background, who tried to lead Greece a decade ago to safer shores from near default owing to unmanageable debt during his short but eventful stint.

The economy needs to be managed by professional economists with strong academic credentials and experience of development economics. That is the kind of person who is most likely to put the common man’s interest on the front burner rather than pursuing the fallacious mindset that what is good for the business/industrial community is good for the economy. Actually, it is not.

Dr Rashid Jooma
Karachi

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2024