By Mehtab Haider in The News, Sept 24, 2023
ISLAMABAD: UK’s visiting professor of Economic Policy at Oxford University, Stefan Dercon, has said even elite in Pakistan are losing ground and legitimacy, and they will have to change to kick-start the economy and remove dependence on getting dollar inflows from abroad.

“The elite will have to change to build up common grounds because there is no quick fix. It can be done through political bargaining among the military, politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and journalists. There is no quick fix,” former economic adviser to the Department for International Development (DfID) said while speaking on the second day of a conference, organised by the World Bank (WB), in collaboration with the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) here on Saturday.

Dercon said Pakistan’s elite bargain is just focused on enough stability to achieve the status quo, but there are voices that maintaining of the status quo would not provide any solution. The status quo, he said, was basically a zero-sum game.

He cited the example of a cricket match where the selectors were choosing the team and players were on the ground, but this whole game was not securing the desired results. He said the IMF’s next bailout package would not provide a solution and the same applied to getting bailout from other bilateral donors. He said Pakistan’s economy was in a bad shape and there would be no one rescuing the ailing economy of the country. “The solution is to develop common grounds,” he said…….
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/1112794-pakistan-elite-losing-ground-legitimacy-uk-scholar