The disregard for environmental considerations began with President Ayub Khan’s two-pronged growth blanket focused on i) industrialization and ii) green revolution. Each had been transformative acts for the normal economic system and set national benchmarks for financial development for many years. Nevertheless, this success has been supported by a variety of direct and indirect subsidies and schemes, reminiscent of licenses and permits, tax breaks and exemptions, concessional loans, guaranteed inputs and value controls. Successive governments have used comparable instruments. At no level have the environmental prices of such growth been calculated. In reality, each successive authority has added layers of complexity to the dilemma.
Ignorance of environmental degradation in all likelihood stemmed from preliminary innocence that environmental information was at a rudimentary stage. Nevertheless, over time, this has become an extremely conscious cover alternative. Ultimately, this was clearly consistent with the then-violent international discourse dominated by Nobel laureate Simon Kuznet’s famous Kuznet curve. Kuznet confirmed, using an inverted curve, that inequality begins to decline when per capita income reaches a certain level. Nevertheless, this ‘drip’ impact has so far been elusive in Pakistan.
Stakeholders are reduced to easy audiences who witness the depletion of pure assets.
As the environmental price of economic growth became more visible, Gene Grossman and Elen Kruger took this debate forward in the mid-1990s and proposed what is now called the environmental Kuznet curve, arguing that financial development ultimately determines precisely the environmental impact of the first period. . levels of financial growth. The prevailing assumption was that environmental considerations could wait to be addressed once financial growth reached a certain stage. Available evidence and empirical research have long challenged this argument, but policymakers in Pakistan continue to abide by the expired prescription. Environmental prices continue to be consistently dismissed as externalities, and so far no hedging device has been used in the country to calculate hidden prices for the economy and society. The country’s ecosystems are under undue stress, but legendary per capita income ranges seem to come out of nowhere.
President Ayub has centralized planning and growth in ways to consolidate his energy. President Zia got a head start and found a way to manage parliamentarians through his favorite growth plans, thanks to Dr. Mahbub ul Haq. This worked because parliamentarians were less involved in environmental issues or other governance issues and more involved in getting help from authorities for their most popular projects. This centralized additional indigenous environmental and growth agendas and gutted democracy. The planning process has become a prisoner of small and completely different plans and the country has lost the way of planning for growth. Since the early 1990s, growth has succumbed to political intrigue, a practice that all political governments have found too engaging to abandon.
