‘Budget exercise useful?’

This is apropos a Business Recorder op-ed “Budget exercise useful?” carried by the newspaper yesterday. The writer, Shahid Mehmood, has aptly advanced his argument by concluding that “the exercise of preparing, printing and presenting budgets constitutes a travesty, a waste of time, gives further vent to corruption, rent seeking and unproductive behaviour, and ends up costing the nation significantly (both in monetary and non-monetary terms). I cannot say about the rest of the world, but in Pakistan, this no-good exercise needs to be done away with.”

There is no doubt about the fact that budget exercise is an exercise in futility insofar as the government approach to budget-making is concerned. This is an open secret. In financial jargon in relation to publicly-traded companies, budget exercise normally refers to an urgent expense-cutting effort, usually spurred by financial under-performance. Our government, however, has much greater control over expenses than over revenues.

Islamabad Saleem Murad