Management in Pakistan

The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) approach was pioneered in the US across 35,000 establishments. The latest initiative took place in the largest province of Pakistan, where management practices were successfully measured in 2,000 firms and mapped to performance indicators from the census of manufacturing. This exercise has been a first step towards understanding the state of management practices in Punjab, Pakistan, raising the question of how well managed are establishments in other provinces and whether this explains any uneven growth within Pakistan.

Pakistan’s ambitious target of 5.5% economic growth for the coming fiscal year calls for the identification of opportunities and existing clusters of excellence across all industries. International research finds that management practices in developing countries are poor, and likely holding back their growth. Indeed, in the first wave of MOPS conducted in Punjab we find that the adoption of structured management practices in Pakistan's is far lower than the US and low productivity and less structured management are significantly correlated.  This evidence further confirms the relevance of structured practices as a productivity-enhancing tool in a developing economy setting.

This new project aims to extend MOPS to the remaining three provinces: Sindh, Baluchistan and Khyber Pakthunkhwa (KPK).  Insofar, these provinces had been inaccessible due to weak response rates in previous surveys due to a challenging law and order situation and difficult access.

The lack of intra-agency coordination is equally an important impediment for economic growth in developing as well as developed economies ones. The first wave of MOPS has already shown the potential to create strong synergies between two federal bodies as it was their first direct collaboration.  Thus, the new wave of MOPS aims to further strengthen this bond with the objective to institutionalising the MOPS in Pakistan.

PBS is proposing to append MOPS and estimate a positive response for MOPS of approximately 2500 establishments, while CMI would remain mandatory (1500 in Sindh 1500, 500 in Baluchistan, and 700 in KPK).  We expect that a larger number of establishments would respond to MOPS because it is a simple survey which takes about 30 minutes to complete, the activity is at the census level- a unique occurrence, SBP project managers and enumerators will directly get involved in data collection process, and we have valuable experience from Punjab through a very successful collaboration between the State Bank Pakistan and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (the very first synergy between these two organisations).