Pakistan’s government announced this week that the national economy grew by 3.7 percent in the outgoing fiscal year 2025–26, with per capita income rising to $1,901 — an increase of $150 from the previous year. The National Accounts Committee also confirmed that the overall size of the economy has reached $452.1 billion, placing Pakistan among the 42nd largest economies in the world.
On the surface, these are numbers that a struggling economy can take some comfort in. But for the vast majority of Pakistanis — the shopkeeper in Karachi, the factory worker in Faisalabad, the farmer in Sindh — the story that statistics tell is almost unrecognisable from the one they live every day.
The contradiction begins with how these figures are calculated. GDP growth and per capita income are national averages — they add up all the wealth produced in the country and divide it equally across the population on paper, regardless of how unevenly that wealth is actually distributed.
In a country where income inequality has been worsening for four consecutive years, an average figure of $1,901 per person per year means very little when a significant portion of the population earns far below that.
What pushes the average up — higher foreign remittances flowing into specific households, gains in the services sector, and a relatively stable exchange rate — are factors that do not reach the ordinary citizen in any direct or tangible way.
Meanwhile, the very policies that have produced these headline numbers have simultaneously made life harder for ordinary people. The government’s own planning ministry acknowledged that four years of “economic stabilisation” — implemented primarily to satisfy the conditions of international lenders such as the IMF — have taken what it called a “heavy toll” on national output, and have contributed directly to rising poverty, higher unemployment, and widening income inequality.
Subsidies on electricity and fuel have been slashed by 25 percent, dropping from Rs 1.2 trillion to Rs 893 billion. Those cuts, celebrated in fiscal reports as deficit reduction, have translated into electricity bills and petrol prices that ordinary Pakistanis describe as unbearable. The stabilisation path, far from offering relief, has been a years-long exercise in pain deferred to the many and gains recorded for the few.
The industrial sector’s performance underscores this tension most clearly. While large-scale manufacturing posted a headline growth figure of 6.11 percent, the broader industry sector is, by the government’s own admission, “badly suffering” due to high taxation, soaring energy prices, expensive borrowing, and unpredictable economic policies.
Construction, one of the largest employers of low-skilled labour in the country, slowed from 8.8 percent growth last year to 5.7 percent — a decline that directly translates into fewer daily-wage jobs on building sites across the country.
The electricity and gas sector contracted by over 10 percent, a figure that reflects not a drop in consumption but the withdrawal of affordable energy from the market.
These are not abstract statistics; they are the daily realities of darkened homes and shuttered small businesses.
With the government already committed in writing to the IMF to maintain its stabilisation course in the next fiscal year — including the delivery of a Rs2.8 trillion primary budget surplus — there is little immediate prospect of relief.
Economists warn that the metrics used to judge Pakistan’s economic health are designed to satisfy creditors and international institutions, not to reflect the wellbeing of its citizens.
A 3.7 percent growth rate that coexists with rising poverty is not a success story with an asterisk — it is a policy failure dressed in the language of progress. Until the gap between what the numbers say and what the people feel begins to close, Pakistan’s economic reports will continue to describe a country that most of its inhabitants do not recognise.
