Pakistan has a long history of launching – but not implementing – policies and plans of all kinds. In fact, if there is one thing we can be sure of when developing a policy (or plan), it must be there is often no plan to actually implement it. Take any policy or planning document or a five-year plan this country has produced – we have produced many since the 1960s when this process began – and one can easily see this to be the case.
Every plan begins with an appraisal of how the previous plan did, and while an effort is made to demonstrate that the previous plan worked (or not), it is often easy to spot that the plan did not achieve even half of what it was supposed to achieve and whatever was achieved was, perhaps, in spite of the plan and not because of it. It is often repeated in our development discourse that Pakistan designed some masterful five-year plans in the 1960s that were copied by the South Koreans and a claim is made that had Pakistan implemented what it planned, we would have been where South Korea is today. I don't know to what extent the former statement is correct, but I can assume that there may be some truth to the latter.
If one studies the South Korean development model from the late 1950s and 1960s onwards, one is surprised at how flawless and masterful the South Koreans have been in identifying the right policy levers, picking the right winners, and implementing whatever they have planned. And this has resulted in South Korea becoming one of th.