Institutional Reforms in Pakistan The Missing Piece of the Development Puzzle Sakib Sherani November 2017 After nearly three decades of strong performance in terms of economic growth, Pakistan’s economy has floundered since the 1990s. The country’s economic performance has deteriorated both with regards to its own historical trend as well as when benchmarked against developing country peers. The deteriora­tion is structural and not cyclical, manifesting itself across a wide front and has persisted for a protracted period. The weak secular performance of the economy has occurred in a context of a broad atrophy of the country’s institutional framework. Is there a correlation or, indeed, even causality between the two developments? The corpus of growth litera­ture on Pakistan has largely ignored to study the country’s historical economic performance, in particular the period of decline from the early 1990s, through an institutional prism. This paper attempts to do that, with the caveat that it should be regarded as a preliminary issues paper, laying out the landscape and providing a broad examination of the issues. The study does, however, hint at possible solutions and approaches to institutional reform, in particular relating to institutions of economic governance, and the way forward.