Zafar Masud, President and CEO of the Bank of Punjab, has called for a fundamental shift from conventional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to a comprehensive ‘Welfare GDP’ measure, arguing that current growth figures fail to capture the lived economic realities of ordinary citizens . Delivering a lecture titled “Measuring Welfare-GDP Beyond Arithmetic” at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI), Mr. Masud posed a critical question: “If Pakistan’s economy is growing at 3.7 per cent, why does that growth not register at the household level?” .
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Using five years of data spanning FY21 to FY25, Mr. Masud demonstrated that while headline GDP grew by 18.8%, adjusting for population growth reduced this to just 9.6% . When further adjusted for income distribution and the actual prices paid by the poor for food and fuel, the bottom 40% of households were found to be 3% worse off overall, while the wealthiest segment captured cumulative welfare gains of 9.9% .
