Leading Issues in the Economy of Pakistan: Agenda for Reforms Credit must be given to the PML(N) government for cumulative expansion in capacity for power generation by almost 47 percent, equivalent to an additional 10,742 MW, in the latter part of its tenure, Chinese investment was attracted as part of CPEC. This has contributed further to additional capacity of almost 10,000 MW up to 2021-22. Here again, the larger component of costs of power outages on the national economy have been borne during the tenure of the PPP government. These costs declined sharply in the last three years of the PML(N) government and have been non-existent in the first three years of the PTI government. Overall, the role of negative factors has been much greater during the tenure of the PPP government. 1.3 Rate of Economic Growth Following identification of the external environment and impact of different domestic and negative factors in the three different regimes, assessment of the performance in key macroeconomic indicators is undertaken in this section and subsequent sections. The first performance indicator analyzed is the rate of economic growth. Table 1.4 gives an in-depth picture of the growth performance in the first and last years, as well as the average, for the PPP and PML(N) governments. This is shown for the first and the fourth years of the PTI government. There is need to emphasis that comparison over time has been rendered difficult by the change in the base year of the GDP from 2005-06 to 2015­16. The GDP series with base year of 2015-16 has been extrapolated backwards to 2007-08 in Annexure 1. The average annual GDP growth rate has been the highest during the tenure of the PML(N) government at 4.7 percent, as compared to 2.8 percent in the period of the PPP government and 3.5 percent in the PTI government tenure up to 2020-21. These growth rates are all low by historical standards. There has been a pattern in the annual GDP growth rates. All three governments have achieved a higher growth rate in the last year of their respective tenures. This is the consequence of the pursuit of expansionary fiscal and monetary policies prior to the elections in the case of the PPP and PML(N) governments, while the last year of the PTI government saw a strong recovery after COVID-19. Among the productive sectors, a somewhat higher growth rate was achieved during the PPP tenure in agriculture, despite the damage due to floods in 2009-10. Industrial growth and expansion of services proceeded faster in the five years of the PML(N) Government. The contribution from the demand side of different expenditures has varied substantially. The fastest growth among different expenditures during the period of PPP government is observed in government consumption expenditure. This is attributable mostly to expansion 6