Pakistan’s economic freedom ranking drops to 98th in world(Bangladesh 96th, India 66th)

Pakistan’s economic freedom ranking drops to 98th in world

By Sajid Chaudhry

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s economic freedom ranking in the world declined to 98 out of 127 countries as compared to 90 the previous year, reported the Economic Freedom of the World Report 2005’s Special Pakistan Edition on Wednesday.

Published by Alternate Solutions Institute in collaboration with Friedrich Naumann Foundation, the report is based on findings of The Fraser Institute, Canada, that reviewed the country’s economic freedom situation in 2003 while comparing the economic freedom situation in 2002. The economic freedom ranking of Pakistan with a score of 5.7 was 90th in the world out of 127 countries in 2002, which then declined to 5.6 in 2003, the report said.

The Economic Freedom of the World Report 2005 Special Pakistan Edition highlighted that the despite de-nationalisation, de-regulation, privatisation and liberalisation, we are moving down on the scale of economic freedom. We are being bracketed with poor African countries such as Mali, Papua New Guinea and that we are behind many than many under-developed and developing countries such as Madagascar, Nigeria and Senegal. The economic freedom forecast for Pakistan in the current year 2006 is not so encouraging. In the South Asian countries, even Bangladesh has better ranking of economic freedom of 96th than Pakistan and that India is far ahead of us with a ranking of 66th in the world.

The decline in Pakistan’s ranking is attributed to (a) size of the government and its expenditures, taxes on enterprises, (b) weak legal structure and security of property rights, (c) inadequate access to sound money (credit), (c) limited freedom to exchange with foreigners and (d) weak regulations of credit, labour and business. The report has suggested that our performance scale of economic freedom in the area of legal structure and security of property rights, judicial independence, protection of intellectual property rights and integrity of legal system requires immediate attention.