 Register to Earn: Formalising the individual through incentives-the fastest runway to URAAN Pakistan's trillion-dollar economyNasir Iqbal
No 2026:64, PIDE Policy View Point from Pakistan Institute of Development Economics Abstract: Start with the individual: Begin with one person. A twenty-three-year-old in Faisalabad who repairs air-conditioners. He is skilled and entirely invisible to the state: no record, no pension, no insurance, and no way for a customer across town to find him or for a bank to lend against income he cannot prove. He is one of tens of millions. Today, the state's only message to him is a warning: get documented so we can tax you. He hears it and retreats further into the shadows. Now change the message. He opens an app, taps his national identity card once, and within minutes he is registered. That single tap gives him a pension that follows him from job to job, accident and health cover, a skills voucher, a line of credit he can draw against his recorded earnings, and a place on a national marketplace where the family three streets away can find him by name and rating. In return, he pays a small levy on what he earns, and nothing else. No notice, no inspector, no fear. He is no longer hiding; he is in business. And he will remember which government put him there. Pages: 7 pages Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pid:pviewp:2026:64 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in PIDE Policy View Point from Pakistan Institute of Development Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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