There is the tangible impact of industrial base that happened due to nationalization and then there was much more devastating intangible impact of our businessmen becoming risk averse rent seekers. We can’t even begin to quantify the loss due to this gimmick!When I did my MBA in business school Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University) in the U.S. BECO was used as a case study in one of the management courses, that's when I 1st had exposure to this company and it's eventual demise due to Bhutto.
The class was about organizational development and operations and BECO was held as a prime example for a developing nation.
This tells you even in the U.S. they had a close eye and study companies that perform well and teach those management skills which are then passed out to national/international companies. We had a gem in Pakistan, but completely ruined it.
As for why US business school had and eye on BECO (one of many promising companies utterly destroyed by nationalization) you can see below. Just look at the number of head of state level visits to it:
Impact Of Nationalization On BECO And Pakistan Economic Development
There had been many times in Pakistan’s history when stupid decisions were taken by the government. Nationalization in Bhutto’s era was one of those decisions. 22 Families lost everythi…
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Exactly, like I said in my reply to PakFactor. We can’t even quantify the intangible impact of nationalization, i.e., the killing of our entrepreneurial spirit and turning our business folks into risk averse rent seekers.I can understand nationalization for natural resources. That's all natural stuff that no one 'made' and that the state is probably best equipped to extract, refine and sell them. In turn, the profits belong to the public, so we should have a mechanism that lets the public have a say in how to spend the proceeds. Otherwise, you'll end up selling the rights to the resources out to a foreign company and miss out on most of the benefits.
But this idea of nationalizing industrial SMEs (which is what ZAB did) was a malicious strike. It was simply a calculated hit disguised as a policy. Since then, we've built a culture of down-streaming the work of business to party workers and other 'stakeholders' who don't deserve anything. And we've completely deflated/killed domestic investor confidence (out of fear of a ZAB 2.0).