New index reorders provincial race

Pakistan has never really assessed how much a provincial government has improved during its tenure; instead, provinces have generally been ranked against one another, a method that repeatedly puts Punjab on top regardless of which party is in power. A new Provincial Performance Scorecard (PPS-9), authored by Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) Professor of Economics and Registrar Dr Nasir Iqbal, takes a different approach: it asks how far each province has moved from its own position in 2024, rather than where it stands today. "Punjab wins every year - under governments of every party, and of none," Iqbal said, arguing that such rankings measure what a province inherited rather than what its government achieved. The scorecard measures the performance of the four provincial governments from their 2024 starting positions using nine indicators covering fiscal delivery, economic activity, labour and household welfare. These are development envelope, budget credibility, own-source revenue, transport fuel, unemployment, youth participation, food insecurity, poverty incidence and inequality. The assessment also takes into account the return of inflation to 11.1% in August 2026, arguing that the common national environment makes differences in provincial performance more visible. All four provincial governments came into office around the same period in late February and early March 2024 and have operated through two provincial budgets under broadly the same federal economic conditions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme, which requires provincial governments to maintain a surplus, and the development programme rationed by the National Economic Council in June 2026. Punjab ranks first under two of the three weighting methods, while Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) takes the top position under equal weighting. Punjab's score stays within a narrow 60-61 range across the three methods, indicating that its position changes little regardless of how the index is weighted. K-P has a wider range of 55-61. Sindh and Balochistan occupy the last two positions, but their order changes according to the weighting used. The report therefore declines to rank one above the other, arguing that a ranking that changes with the weighting is not a stable ranking. No province has managed to lead across the full range of provincial functions. No province records the highest score on more than four of the nine indicators, while every province has at least one score below five. "Performance in Pakistan does not follow a provincial pattern; it follows a functional pattern, and no government has succeeded in assembling a full set," Iqbal writes. Punjab emerges as the strongest performer on own-source revenue and the development envelope, but is among the weakest on budget credibility. Its approved development envelope grew by 7% in nominal rupees while the national provincial portfolio fell by 8%. At the same time, Punjab sought nearly twice the development amount that it ultimately spent, producing a budget credibility score of just 1.9. K-P presents a contrasting picture with its strongest economic activity reading but the weakest development-envelope performance. Balochistan is almost its mirror image, recording one perfect score but two scores close to zero. The findings raise questions about the assumption that larger provincial development budgets automatically translate into stronger economic activity. Sindh also presents a striking contradiction. It has the country's lowest unemployment rate and the largest services tax base, but records the fastest rise in poverty and the fastest widening of inequality among the four provinces. "This suggests that whatever its economy produced, it did not reach the bottom of the distribution," the report notes. Why movement matters The central idea behind the exercise is to measure movement, not level, according to Iqbal. The scorecard also treats the government, rather than the chief minister, as the unit being assessed, avoiding assigning the entire period to a political leader who was not in office for all of it. In K-P, for example, Sohail Afridi became chief minister in October 2025, while roughly two-thirds of the period covered by the scorecard falls under Ali Amin Gandapur. "A personalised ranking would either flatter or punish a man who was not in the room," Iqbal argues. National improvement stripped out The second major feature is that the scorecard removes changes caused by the national economy rather than provincial policy. For indicators such as fuel sales, employment and prices, each province's change is compared with the national change over the same period. "Without that step, the index measures the macroeconomy and attributes it to four individuals," Iqbal says. This adjustment can materially change the result. Punjab's 7% nominal increase in its development envelope, for example, is assessed against an 8% decline in the national provincial portfolio, placing it near the top rather than in the middle. A deliberately narrow test The scorecard includes only indicators that meet four conditions: they must exist for all four provinces, be compiled on a common basis, be published by an institution other than the province being assessed, and have both a 2024 baseline and a post-2024 reading. That leaves nine indicators. Several other potential indicators were rejected rather than included on weak or incompatible data. Night-time light data was excluded because gas flaring in Sindh and Balochistan produces persistent light that can be mistaken for economic activity. Provincial Consumer Price Index (CPI) was rejected because the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics publishes city rather than provincial indices, while reported crime was excluded because provinces collect it on incompatible bases. The report ends with a proposal for a 12-month transparency compact under which each province could publish six measures on its own, without requiring new money or federal permission.