Why Pakistan Must Break-into the Knowledge Economy
Keywords:
Pakistan , knowledge economy, trajectory, technology.Abstract
The author emphasizes in this paper that this was the moment in Pakistan’s economic trajectory for it to learn to leap frog technologically from a labor intensive economy, by passing the intermediate stages of resource based and scale based activities, to a knowledge based economy. A knowledge based economy is one that bases its growth not on increasing capital or land or labor inputs, but on knowledge. The transition required is considerable, the author points out. There is growing recognition that the global economy is increasingly driven by “knowledge” rather than the traditional factors of production. Pakistan’s Medium-Term Development Framework (MTDF) 2005-2010 and Vision 2030 Approach Paper both recognize the key role of knowledge in economic growth when they describe the goal of transforming Pakistan by 2030 into a “Developed, industrialized, just and prosperous Pakistan through rapid and sustained development … by deploying knowledge inputs”.1
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