Saturday, June 12, 2010

Good Governance tribulations in Pakistan

The issue of governance is a key component of policies for economic development. Good governance acts as a positive force to influence economic growth. A growing amount of available evidence suggests that lack of quality governance hinders growth and investment, and aggravates poverty and inequality. As the matter of fact developing countries are characterized by weak institutions, low growth, poverty and inequality all which translate into low levels of human development. The multiplicative effects of these outcomes result in poverty traps that are extremely difficult to break out.
Good governance can lead a country to achieve high and sustained economic growth by establishing conducive environment for saving and investment, risk taking, providing incentives to producers, creating certainty in markets, increasing the size of markets by removing barriers to international trade and improvements in competitiveness. It is a key component in the development factors. The emphasis on reforming economies to achieve high rates of economic growth is largely motivated by the fact that economic growth associates with lower poverty rates and improvements in the quality of life. It is assumed that there is a strong link between economic growth and poverty reduction.
Basically, Governance means process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented. The quality of governance is determined by the impact of this exercise of power on the quality of life enjoyed by the citizens. Governance can be used in several contexts such as international governance, corporate governance, national governance and local governance. Government is one of the actors in governance. Asian Development Bank (1995) identified four basic elements of good governance such as accountability, participation, predictability and transparency.
Political Governance consists of two factors as (i) Voice and accountability. (ii) Political instability and violence. The political governance indicator is intended to capture the process by which government is selected, monitored and replaced. Indicator such as “voice and accountability” measures political, civil, human rights and independence of the media. It includes a number of indicators measuring various aspects of political process, civil liberties and political rights. It measures the extent to which citizens of a country are able to participate in the selection of government while the “political instability” indicator captures whether the government in power will be destabilized or overthrown by possibly unconstitutional or violent means, including military cop, terrorism etc. Pakistan after analyzing on both factors is a politically instable country.
Economic Governance has also two factors as (i) Government effectiveness. (ii) Regulatory quality. These two indicators summarize various indicators that include the government’s capacity to effectively formulate and implement sound policies. The thrust of this is on the input required government to be able to produce or implement good policies and quality delivery of public good. The ‘regulatory quality’ governance indicator includes measures of the incidence of market unfriendly policies such as price control or inadequate bank supervision, as well as the perceptions of the burdens imposed by excessive regulation in area such as foreign trade and business development. Pakistan is also weak on these grounds.
To remedies these solution what Pakistan needs is to develop proper and transparent process of elections so that right leadership can come on up front. Also planning in every exist but poor implementation is ruining image of government all over the country and abroad which require a serious heed to resolve issues like that.

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