One would be hard pressed to find any senior government ministers tweeting about how the current account did in December 2020 since it dropped back into red after staying positive for five straight months, except perhaps to blame this on the previous government as well, but it isn’t entirely a bad thing. But then neither was its stay in green for almost half a year all that the government made it out to be considering the long-term economic health or trajectory of Pakistan. No doubt the government’s hard work, reflected in its policies, had much to do with it, but our exports rose over the last half year primarily because we emerged better from the first wave of the coronavirus than much of the world and hence were able to capture export markets whose traditional producers were still in lockdown. Indeed, just seeing how our textile producers have been flush with international orders despite the overall downward drag on trade, one only has to put two and two together to understand how we took over commerce that other countries, like India and Bangladesh, used to provide for. The argument that imports suddenly went up in December because the economy is gaining strength also explains only half the picture. Sure, there is a visible pickup in large scale manufacturing, which is a very good thing and should translate into healthier export earnings soon enough. But we’ve also had to suddenly import a lot more things, like cotton, sugar, wheat, etc, that we would not have had to if only the government had protected their supply chains. The case of sugar imports, especially, turned into a complete fiasco because first it was assumed that there was abundant local supply and the commodity was allowed to be exported. Indeed, even exports rebates were given, which is not unusual considering clout sugar mill owners enjoy in the halls of power, but then suddenly an acute shortage appeared in the home market and we ended up importing a lot of sugar at pretty steep rates. It’s a shame that no heads were made to roll because of this. The kind of fragile financial environment the government is operating in, there is just no excuse for the current account to drop from a surplus of $513 million in November 2020 to a deficit of $662 million in December 2020; a cumulative drop of more than a billion dollars. It’s also more than a small concern that the December 2020 c/a deficit is 130 percent higher than the December 2019 deficit, which clocked in at $287 million. There is also the fact that even in the recent surplus months export growth never crossed the peak experienced in 2018. And if last month’s trend continues, which saw exports rise eight percent and imports jump by 32 percent year-on-year, we might return to the not-very-old trend of very high deficits pretty soon; only this time with a much weaker currency that has not done enough for exports so far. The government must arrest these disturbing short-term trends before they become long-term problems once again, because the economy can go nowhere really if there’s nothing in the kitty. *