Trapped

Today’s underdog: Pakistan

Pakistan is in trouble. This is a fact. Pakistan is in trouble because Pakistan is in the “bottom billion”. Coined by Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion, the term “bottom billion” refers to the lowest one billion people in the world, whose countries are the only ones left who haven’t developed or aren’t developing. Collier identifies four traps that help characterize why these nations are stuck in the bottom billion: conflict, landlocked, natural resource, and bad governance. How does Pakistan fit into these traps?

Collier argues that a landlocked nation is dependent on its neighbors for exporting its goods, and if there are bad neighbors, those goods may be too expensive to export--the landlocked trap. Pakistan is not in this trap, because while Pakistan is surrounded by bad neighbors in Iran and Afghanistan, Pakistan has access to the sea. The natural resource trap, which refers to inadequate control of large quantities of resources leading to economic woes, is also absent for Pakistan. Pakistan has fewer resources than those nations in the trap like the Democratic Republic of Congo (world resources), and better control of the resources it does have.

But Pakistan is in other traps. First, Pakistan is in the trap of bad governance, or poor leadership resulting in economic stagnation or decline. Consider the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment from the World Bank, the same index Collier uses. Most of the areas examined by the index place Pakistan in the middle of the scale. But, speaking generally, these values have declined over the last seven years. And two numbers are particularly low: gender equality (2 out of 6) and transparency, accountability, and corruption in the public sector (2.5). Let’s consider the same index, but for Chad, a nation Collier identifies to be in the trap, in order to get a good comparison. The ratings are lower for Chad than Pakistan, but not by a large margin. And when we consider the fact that Pakistan’ economic growth from 2005-2008 has largely ceased, it is hard to argue in favor of Pakistan’s government. In fact, in this blog post, Professor Ashfaque Khan blames the decline largely on Pakistan’s government being unprepared to deal with the global financial crisis beginning in 2008. Based on this observation and the data presented, Pakistan is in the bad governance trap.

Finally, Pakistan and the conflict trap. The conflict trap asserts that a nation with inner conflict is likely to have continued conflict, and that conflict, specifically civil war, can cost upwards of $64 billion. Well, has Pakistan had conflict or coups? Here is a great resource that gives a summary on major Pakistani conflicts and coups. As the size of the list may imply, Pakistan has definitely had conflict. In fact, there have been two military coups, one in 1977 and another in 1999. There has also been civil conflict, and several incidents of fighting between India and Pakistan. Finally, Pakistan has had several conflicts with terrorist organizations (namely Al Qaeda) and the Taliban. With all this conflict, it’d be hard to say Pakistan wasn’t in the conflict trap. The military still has significant political influence and another coup is not out of reason. Ethnic tensions are still high and conflict with India is always possible. The conflict trap clearly limits Pakistan’s potential. Furthermore, the military coups have created worse governance through corruption and autocracy, reinforcing Pakistan’s other trap. The two traps also play into a sort of loop, bad governance ensuring limited effectiveness of conflict prevention, and conflict, namely coups, making bad governance worse.

These facts lend us to the conclusion that Pakistan is an underdog. Pakistan’s two traps not only ensure poor economic production and violence, but the two also reinforce each other, making it even harder for Pakistan to “win” and achieve economic and political success. So how can Pakistan win as the underdog? And how long will it take?