Policies·pk_peca_amendment_2025

Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act 2025 (Peca)

PAK·2025 – 2025·enacted 2025-01-29·PML-N + PPP + allies coalitioncandidate

movesrule of law↓product market competition↓

What the policy did

Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act 2025, assented 29 January 2025. Introduced 'Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority' (SMPRA) with broad takedown powers; criminalised 'fake' or 'false' information online with imprisonment up to 3 years and PKR 2m fines; created a dedicated Social Media Protection Tribunal; expanded jurisdiction to apply to non-registered social-media platforms. Rolled out amid an ongoing block on X (Twitter) in effect since February 2024 around the general election. Civil-society, journalist-union, and opposition contestation substantial; PFUJ and HRCP issued withdrawal demands. Framed by government as counter-disinformation measure; framed by opposition as pre-election speech suppression entrenched in statute.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

unintended / side-effect

↓

rule of law

institutional.rule_of_law

Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.

decreased · moderate · unintended

weaker rule of law

Vague 'false information' offences with imprisonment; executive-appointed tribunal composition.

↓

product market competition

regulatory.product_market_competition

Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.

decreased · weak · unintended

more restrictive regulation, higher entry barriers

SMPRA compliance overhead for platforms; non-registered platforms subject to blocking.

Enacted by

pakistan_shehbaz_pmln_coalition_2024_present

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

Estonia adopted among the most radical market-liberalisation packages of any post-Soviet state — flat tax (26% universal rate, 1994), currency board (EEK pegged to DM/EUR, 1992), rapid privatisation, unilateral free trade, and minimal capital controls — and by 2007 had recovered to Soviet-era GDP per capita levels and substantially exceeded them, while Belarusian and Ukrainian peers had not recovered comparably.

estonia_market_reform_post_soviet_growth_1991_2007inferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.rule_of_law

PARTIAL — recovery threshold pass=True (year_recovered=1998, 2007 vs 1991 = 70.53282727739165); Baltic−CIS gap pass=False (gap=5.1509956229348575)

partial

Across a broad panel of economies 1980-2020, market reforms (privatisation, trade liberalisation, and price decontrol) produce durable gains in real GDP per capita growth only when rule-of-law scores exceed a minimum threshold (WGI Rule of Law > -0.5, approximately the 40th percentile of the global distribution).

rule_of_law_market_reform_complementarityinferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.rule_of_law

REFUTED — coef=-0.1483 (sign opposite claim +), p=0.00481

refuted

The Soviet central-planning system, having already exhibited TFP stagnation 1970-1989, underwent a canonical institutional and economic collapse 1989-1998 as plan-enforcement was withdrawn without functioning market institutions in place.

soviet_union_central_planning_gdp_collapse_1989_1991inferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competition

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']

run pending

Starting from comparable 1945 post-war conditions — same ethnicity, language, pre-war German institutional and industrial inheritance, and with the GDR inheriting a larger share of pre-war industrial capital in Saxony and Thuringia — the Federal Republic's Soziale Marktwirtschaft (Ordoliberal market economy with welfare state) versus the German Democratic Republic's planned economy with administered prices, state-enterprise production, and soft budget constraints produced by 1989 a canonical divergence that pattern-matches >=7 of 10 pre-registered extreme-outcome metrics, each drawn from a different publisher or methodology family.

west_east_germany_economic_system_divergence_1950_1989inferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.rule_of_law

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']

run pending

El Salvador's FDI inflow, real-GDP growth, tourism arrivals, and business-formation rate accelerated under the Bukele era (2019-2024) relative to a Central American peer-country donor pool (Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Dominican Republic).

bukele_fdi_gdp_investment_climate_2019_2024inferred

viainstitutional.rule_of_lawregulatory.product_market_competition

PARTIAL — mean_gap=-0.697, |gap|/pre_sd=1.2, p_perm=1 (gap below 0.5×pre_sd or placebo p≥0.10)

partial

From 2000 to 2023, Asian economies that continued market-oriented institutional reform from a low starting GDP-per-capita base — China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Cambodia — converged rapidly on Western income levels, with cumulative log GDP-per-capita-PPP growth materially greater than incumbent Western economies.

asian_convergence_vs_western_stagnation_2000_2023inferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.rule_of_law

PARTIAL — coef=+4.616e-17, p=0.912; effect magnitude effectively zero

partial

Higher transition-era rule-of-law scores are positively associated with higher log GDP per capita within the post-Soviet and Eastern European transition cohort after country and year fixed effects; Estonia/Poland-style inclusive-institution build-out should outperform partial extraction persistence cases such as Russia and Ukraine.

post_soviet_transition_institutional_variationinferred

viainstitutional.rule_of_lawregulatory.product_market_competition

PARTIAL — coef=-3.693e-10, p=0.719 (above α=0.1); direction inconclusive

partial

Net migration flows per 1,000 population across countries 1990-2020 are positively associated with stronger market institutions (higher Economic Freedom of the World composite, lower OECD PMR product-market regulation, and stronger rule of law), after controlling for per-capita income level, common language networks, and proximity to armed conflict.

net_migration_revealed_preference_market_institutionsinferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.rule_of_law

REFUTED — coef=-1.281e+05 (sign opposite claim +), p=0.00405

refuted

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

Czechoslovak normalizace purge and party-economy restructure 1969-1971

CSK·1969

match

1.5

rule of lawproduct market competition

Iran bonyad (religious foundation) system founding 1979

IRN·1979

match

1.5

rule of lawproduct market competition

Forced Urban Evacuation and Rural Labour Reallocation

KHM·1975