It was quite an honor for Scott Jacobs to receive an award for Regulatory Reform Champion from the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, on December 9 in Islamabad. At the National Regulatory Reforms launch in a ceremony at the Prime Minister’s house, the Prime Minister described the SMART initiative as a ‘quantum leap’ towards improving Pakistan’s investment climate and emphasized the critical role of digitisation in making Pakistan globally competitive.
The one year fast-action, high impact, pro-growth SMART program run by the Board of Investment with the support of the FCDO Remit program created almost 500 reforms across many sectors and formational laws such as the Companies Act. The dedicated Cabinet Committee on Regulatory Reform received the proposals, and mandated change with schedules and monitoring to ensure change on the ground where businesses see real change.
The NPV of the impact over ten years will be almost $9 billion in direct cost reduction, and unquantified dynamic impacts in the form of faster firm growth, more foreign investment, and more innovation. For example, the time needed to approve medical device licenses for export was reduced from almost 800 days to 21 days.
2026 will see the reforms deepen and accelerate as sweeping reforms in Foreign Exchange management, Venture Capital, decriminalization of penalties, and the creation of regulatory governance institutions such as the Regulatory Quality Unit and Pakistan’s first comprehensive legal registry of all laws and regulations are implemented. Pakistan is setting the lead in emerging markets in leaping ahead with the quality of regulation and business environment improvement.
