Businessmen were right to stress, just a few days ago, that ‘Made in Pakistan’ should be made into a buzzword in order to strengthen the manufacturing sector of the country. And that until manufacturing, production and subsequently exports are strengthened, the country will just not be able to achieve a high growth rate. But it will take much work before Pakistan can adopt an export-led growth strategy for some very obvious reasons. And one is that for the longest time, particularly since the onset of the so called decade of democracy of the 1990s, no elected government has risked making long term investments that are not necessarily visible to the voter in time for the next election. That is why motorways and power plants have been far more popular with our leaders than, say, policies that take up a lot of money to introduce value addition in manufacturing and exports that do not immediately capture the headlines or impact the lives of common people in the near term. But now it has become a matter of survival. We continued with our own particular brand of regressive politics while countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Bangladesh – all of which were strides behind us 30-40 years ago – have leapfrogged far ahead precisely because they put manufacturing and export on the top of the agenda. Now we find ourselves far from the starting line as others have already successfully completed a number of laps. That means there’s just no time to lose. The PTI government also needs to honour promises made before it came to power and let a trained team of experts, not political appointees, take charge of this matter. We cannot afford to slip at all at this point. The world of today is already quite different from the world of last year. Because of all the devastation already caused by the coronavirus, much of international trade has come to a stop and a good part of it will have to be renegotiated. A lot of producers have been wiped out internationally so a lot of new partnerships and arrangements will be needed. But only countries that have the infrastructure to meet international demand, and the capacity to meet quality benchmarks, will be in the running. The rest, like Pakistan, will be reduced to watching from a distance because our leaders never though it necessary to erect a credible manufacturing base. That must change now, or we’ll surely be without any stake to speak of in the future of the world economy. *