Last week’s budget speech intoned by Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s Finance minister, sounded more like an election campaign than a review of the country’s economic balance sheet. Dar was more flagrant in his mention of the CPEC game plan, quite likely the N-league’s chief electoral battle cry ahead of next year’s polls. The budget broke open the usual Pandora’s Box: the numbers barring a few, were not radically different from the past few years. The budget deficit stood at a mammoth Rs 1.4 trillion, which comes to around 4.1 percent of the state’s GDP. This means that Pakistan is once again not in a position to paddle its own canoe, as to bridge that deficit it will most likely resort to two chief options: first, printing more money at home, which will inevitably hike inflation and second, foreign borrowing which will jack up the long running external deficit. On the tax side, the revenues that poured into the national kitty sum to around Rs 4 trillion, lower than the targeted Rs 4.4 trillion. The target set for the election year is surprisingly higher at Rs 4.7 trillion. This sudden binge in tax revenues will come from indirect levies, as no democratic regime has ever had the backbone to bring the large sectors, for example, the agricultural land barons under the tax bracket. Taxation in Pakistan has never favoured those on the breadline. Despite recurrent fiscal deficits, administratively poor tax collection regimes, soaring current account numbers and mounting inflation, the government feels that its well on track to be part of the leading 25 global economies of the world: a canard to which the incumbent government is increasingly subscribing, just as it steps into campaign mode. Yet the punch line of the speech came in the form of the announced Rs one trillion-development expenditure, also dubbed to be a 40 percent surge over the outgoing fiscal year. The development expense is laced with big-ticket infrastructure projects, thanks largely, to the Chinese support. The budget once again has offered little incentives to the education and health sectors. And we believe that without out-of-the-box strategies and budgetary measures to revamp these declining sectors — Pakistan’s economy will continue to run into the sand. *