Growth Diagnostics: The Puzzle of Pakistan's Lagging Economic Growth

Advocates of growth diagnostics have shown it to be a preferable alternative to other methods of formulating a growth strategy such as cross-country regressions, growth accounting or international benchmarking using cross country surveys. We show that growth diagnostics also suffers from problems and demands a high level of economic sophistication from its practitioners. We suggest a simpler prelude before launching into rigorous analysis and apply this method to address the puzzle of Pakistan's lagging per capita GDP relative to India.