KARACHI: The Economic Advisory Council (EAC), a body constituted by Prime Minister Imran Khan to advise the government on economic and financial issues, has been in a state of limbo for more than eight months, its members say. Soon after assuming Pakistan’s top political office in August 2018, Khan constituted the 18-member council to advise his administration on short-term macroeconomic stabilization interventions and long-term structural reforms.
Out of the 18 members, seven, including the finance minister and governor State Bank, were government functionaries while 11 were senior economists, experts, academics, and practitioners with rich expertise and knowledge. Chaired by the prime minister himself, the council was supposed to meet at least once a month, and it remained functional till the end of Asad Umer’s tenure as finance minister on April 18, 2019.
“Since Asad Umar left as finance minister, no meeting of the council has been held. During Umer’s tenure, about five or six meetings took place on a monthly basis,” Dr. Abdul Qayyum Sulehri, EAC member, told Arab News. “I don’t think that any EAC meeting has been held in the last eight or nine months,” Dr. Ashfaque Hassan Khan, another senior economist and council member told Arab News. “The council is dysfunctional.”
Soon after the formation of the EAC, the government withdrew the nomination of Dr. Atif R. Mian, who teaches at Princeton University, following objections over his affiliation with the Ahmadi community which was declared a non-Muslim minority by Pakistani legislators in September 1974.
Following Mian’s resignation, two other members, Dr. Asim ljaz Khawaja, who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Dr. Imran Rasul from the University College London to protest the government’s refusal to protect the Princeton academic by announcing to quit. In January 2019, former finance minister and senior economist, Sakib Sherani, tendered his resignation and became the fourth member who quit the council. Sherani had cited personal reasons for stepping down.
The remaining members include Dr. Farrukh Iqbal, Dean and Director of the Institute of Business Administration (IBA); Dr. Ashfaque Hassan Khan, Principal and Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST); Dr. ljaz Nabi of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS); Dr. Abid Qaiyum Suleri, Executive Director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI); Dr. Asad Zaman, Vice-Chancellor of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE); Dr. Naved Hamid, Professor of Economics at the Lahore School of Economics (LSE); and Syed Salim Raza, former governor of State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).
After facing much criticism on his government’s economic policies, PM Khan made sweeping changes to his economic team by making Dr. Abdul Hafeez Shaikh as his finance minister and Dr. Baqir Raza governor State Bank. “Even I would say that the economic environment has changed since we now have a new finance minister and central bank governor. These officials should constitute their own committee for advice,” EAC member Dr. Khan said.
Syed Salim Raza, another member of the EAC and former governor of the central bank, noted that “neither the EAC meetings are being held nor the body has been de-notified” by the government. The EAC members say that the advisory body, whose goal is to strengthen the economic capacity of the government by providing analytical and evidence-driven inputs, should “either be de-notified or convened as per schedule.”
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