Taxing the people — a messy structure

Pakistan’s official tax discourse is mostly structured around a single question: how to collect more revenue. This narrow obsession with short-term revenue targets has produced a deeply distorted tax system that undermines growth, penalises documentation and increasingly shifts the burden onto those who are already visible, compliant and easy to tax. Instead of broadening the tax base through structural reform, successive governments have relied on incremental, often distortionary measures, such...