New Delhi: A national survey in Pakistan on ease of doing business in the country has produced depressing results. About 91 per cent of those surveyed described it as “most difficult”.
The National Citizen Survey findings, conducted by the Islamabad-based Institute for Public Opinion Research, were based on responses from more than 5,000 people across Pakistan.
The survey identified several problems faced by entrepreneurs, chief among which was the complicated tax system (46 per cent), followed by access to loans or financial resources (19 per cent) and corruption and bribery (12 per cent).
Businessmen also called for additional protections for their respective ventures, with 76 per cent of respondents saying new legislation was needed to protect them.
Rising electricity and energy costs accounted for 10 per cent, followed by government regulations at 7 per cent and political instability at 2 per cent.
The survey also captured wider anxiety about the economy. At least 66 per cent of respondents expressed concern about Pakistan’s growing debt burden. Asked about the International Monetary Fund’s programme, 30 per cent described it as harmful, 19 per cent as beneficial and 38 per cent said it provided no benefit to ordinary people.
For analysts and economists, the problem extends beyond individual taxes or regulations.
Zakaullah Warraich, a Pakistani political analyst, argued on X that the country’s governance system remains shaped by institutions originally designed for control and extraction rather than economic development.
“The development and prosperity of people is not the goal here at all. If people become prosperous, then who will the narrow-minded elite here exploit?”, he wrote on X.
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‘Hurt, hounded & harassed’
Pakistan’s adverse business climate is not new. The country was ranked 108th among 190 in the World Bank’s final Ease of Doing Business rankings in 2019—an improvement from 136th place the previous year. The World Bank discontinued the index after 2020.
In July, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called for faster implementation of the government’s policy measures and the Ease of Doing Business Act 2025, as well as independent assessment of whether the reforms were producing results.
Officials said that 558 reforms had been completed as part of efforts to reduce regulations, paperwork and approval procedures. Seventy-one policy measures had been implemented, while work on another 272 was described as progressing rapidly. The reforms are being introduced in seven phases.
But businesses and policy advocates say the central challenge is not simply the number of reforms announced. It is whether the underlying regulatory system changes the way companies interact with the state.
In a May opinion piece for Dawn, Zeelaf Munir, chairperson of the Pakistan Business Council, argued that Pakistan’s regulatory framework had increasingly focused on procedural compliance and institutional processes at the expense of the predictability businesses need to invest and expand.
“What Pakistan needs is a time-bound regulatory implementation plan, with every reform owned, deadlined, and measured quarterly. The architecture is in place. What is missing is the willingness to reset what regulators are for. They should make it easier for businesses to invest and scale by ensuring that markets work fairly, safely, and predictably. They should not be instruments of revenue collection for the state,” she wrote.
Pakistan continues to seek foreign and domestic investment to support growth, but foreign direct investment fell to $1.64 billion in the last fiscal year from $2.48 billion a year earlier.
“Pakistani businesses flourish abroad, inside the country, even legitimate businesses are hurt, hounded & harassed by a vast bureaucratic red-tape, officials inertia & corrupt minions who misuse their powers! If over 90 per cent of Pakistanis have this view, what about foreign investors?” former politician Mushahid Hussain Syed added on X.
As PTI spokesperson Muzammil Aslam put it: “System collapse, business collapse, and public collapse.”
(Edited by Saptak Datta)