Industrial Development and Efficiency in Pakistan: A Revisionist Overview

Abstract

Pakistan was widely hailed as a "model" of economic, especially industrial, development during the 1960s-see, for example, Papanek (1967). At the same time, the experience of Pakistan has been an important part of the basis of the seminal critiques of import-substituting industrialization by Little, Scitovsky and Scott (LSS) in (1970) and by Balassa et al. (1971). Pakistan was one of each of the sample of seven countries examined by LSS (1970) and by Balassa et ai. (1971), respectively. Indeed, within those samples, Pakistan was represented as an extreme case of the sins of import-substituting or "inward-looking" industrialization. This "outlier" in the small samples, hence bore a large part of the burden of the "proofs" of LSS (1970) and Balassa et al. (1971) This paper first attempts an assessment of these contrasting views pertaining to the 1950s and 1960s. There has been considerably less research on Pakistan's industrialization since 1970. Thus, the discussion pertaining to this period is more speculative, and some of the propositions tend to be more in the nature of hypotheses than results of research.