Why has Pakistan been left out of China and East Asia’s economic development boom?

Despite Southeast Asia and China’s astonishing development story, some parts of the world have not shared in that inspiring progress
Constant conflict, the influence of radical Islam, ferocious local politics and challenging conditions have combined to impede Pakistan’s development

David Dodwell

Published: 7:00am, 11 Jul 2020

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This weekend exactly 50 years ago, I walked for a final time out of University Public School into the blinding Peshawar sunlight after a year as a gap-year teacher in what was then called the North-West Frontier Province, tucked under the Khyber Pass leading from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

Whether I made a difference to the lives of my 30-odd students – several had been killed during the year in local feuds – I never discovered, but my life had been transformed. Plans to study English and history at university were turned on their head midway through my immersion in Pakistan.

Instead, I reapplied to study social anthropology and development economics. My simplistic Christian views over how communities set rules over good and bad behaviour crashed and burned in the humble mud-built homes of local Muslims. The crude and complete confinement of women made me appreciate the freedoms and opportunities facing my three younger sisters back home.

Many back in Britain thought I was crazy to disappear to Pakistan and were alarmed at my decision to study something as esoteric as social anthropology and development economics. In truth, I, too, did not clearly know what possible relevance such a combination of study might have to my future life and career.

As it turned out, it could not have been more relevant. It paved the way for a 40-year journalistic career focused on Asia, and in particular China. It meant immersing in cultures most of my schoolmates never discovered and wrestling with development challenges across Asia that few mainstream economists were adequately equipped to analyse.

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By 19, I had learned one of life’s most important lessons: no matter how meticulously you or your parents strive to plan your life, you are doomed to stumble. The single most important force in our lives is chance – the influence of random, accidental events that suddenly and unpredictably transform your life and steer it in unimaginable directions.

I also discovered that no matter what the conventional wisdom about getting the best possible grades and earning a good degree as promptly as possible, my determination to take a gap year between school and university and spend it on the border with Afghanistan was one of the best decisions of my life.

Since then, I have been a passionate advocate of gap years, no matter what nervousness it generates among protective parents. Nothing can so speedily prepare a naive and inexperienced child for independent adulthood.

I have thought of this a lot recently. My research assistant has had her hopes dashed of a year of study at George Washington University in the United States, all because of the pandemic and the sudden appearance of tough new visa rules for students hoping to study in the US.

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Chance has sideswiped her carefully laid career plans. For sure, she will do well. But she is, because of the pandemic, probably heading in a direction quite different from that expected just two months ago.

While I managed to get back to Peshawar half a decade later – glimpsing into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as yet another aspiring colonist strove to tame a profoundly untameable region, and witnessing jirgas in the Balochistan desert aimed at settling decades-old blood feuds – I never got back to University Public School or those pupils.

Neither was I able this year to fulfil a dream of returning 50 years later to explore what half a century had done to this remote, charismatic, impoverished part of the world. I blame the Taliban and the many dangers of searching for former tribal pupils now in their 60s, as well as the fear that it would have been a deeply sad story to unravel.

Having spent most of my life since the late 1970s focused on the astonishing development story that Southeast Asia and China have to tell, I am constantly reminded that some parts of the world have not shared in that inspiring period of progress. Pakistan is one of those places. I would have liked to return to examine why places like Peshawar captured such a small share of half a century of progress.

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Some of the elements are obvious: constant conflict to the west with Afghanistan and Iraq and in the east with India and Kashmir means Pakistan has been doomed to be a pawn in the “great game” global powers like to play; radical Islam has combined with ferociously cantankerous medieval tribalism; the impossibility of trying to fit Western-style democratic institutions with local “patronage” politics; and the challenges of building even basic infrastructure across some of the bleakest, hottest desert regions in the world.

It still shocks me to see how far the region has lagged behind countries in East Asia. While between 1970 and 2019, the World Bank says China lifted its GDP from US$92.6 billion to US$14.3 trillion, and South Korea from US$9 billion to US$1.6 trillion, Pakistan’s GDP has grown from US$10 billion to just US$278.2 billion.

That is even worse than Bangladesh (US$9 billion to US$302.6 billion) and India (US$62.4 billion to US$2.9 trillion), and it sits well below Nigeria (US$12.5 billion to US$448 billion) and Brazil (US$42.3 billion to US$1.8 trillion).

On a per capita basis, Pakistan has done even worse as its population has almost quadrupled, to 220 million, in that period. Its per capita GDP today is about US$1,280, up from US$172 in 1970. The extremities of poverty and illiteracy have been purged, but progress has been painfully slow.

China’s success in slowing population growth provides a stark contrast, with GDP per capita up from US$110 in 1970 to US$10,260 in 2019. Other East Asian economies have grown similarly in that span – South Korea’s GDP per capita is up from US$280 to almost US$32,000, Indonesia from US$80 to US$4,140, and Malaysia from US$360 to US$11,400.

East Asia’s extraordinary success in reducing the gap with rich Western economies has been the story of my lifetime. It continues to perplex me that Pakistan, where the story all started, has shared in it so little. Therein lies the fickle force of chance, which continues to make a mockery of all our best-laid plans.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view