In this essay I will concentrate on economics, my discipline and the one that I have practised not only in Pakistan but in four dozen countries around the world. However, I have learned from this experience that economics should not be separated from other social sciences. In order to fully understand where a country has arrived in developing its economy and where it might be going, we must also develop a good understanding of the social, political, cultural and geographic environments in which this transition took place and how the future might unfold. It is also important to analyse how policy makers have aligned the countries they manage with the outside world. This is the reason why the focus on economics in this essay will take me into the development of the Pakistani society, of its political system, of the changes in its culture and its external policies.

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Shahid Javed Burki, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore; Shahid Javed Burki Institute of Public Policy, Lahore, Pakistan; former Vice President of the World Bank; former Finance Minister of Pakistan. This paper was presented at the Pakistan Summit: Disentangling the Politics of ‘Crisis’: The Pakistani State(s), Governance and Culture from Within, International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, Adelaide, 6 July 2015.