Where Public

Institutional Reform

Dr. Imtiaz Bhatti is a senior public finance and governance specialist with over two decades of experience spanning government leadership, academic teaching, and policy research. Until recently, he served as Director General for Urban & Regional Policy and Strategic Planning in Sindh, Pakistan, where he works at the intersection of fiscal governance, development planning, and institutional reform.
He holds a PhD in Public Policy (Public Budgeting & Finance) from The George Washington University. He received a Fulbright Fellowship for his doctoral studies. He also holds an MSc in Development from University College London. His academic research focuses on fiscal discipline, sovereign risk, institutional credibility, and the political economy of reform, including empirical work on sovereign bond spreads and governance indicators. Alongside his government career, he teaches Public Finance, Public Economics, Economic Theory, Policy Analysis, and Applied Econometrics at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi.
Dr. Bhatti has held senior positions across Pakistan’s provincial administration, including Special Secretary in the Finance Department, where he led Public Financial Management reforms, worked on tax and debt policy, and participated in the drafting of a fiscal responsibility framework for the Sindh province. He has also served as Project Director for the Asian Development Bank-funded Sindh Secondary Education Improvement Project and earlier as Program Officer for the ADB-assisted Sindh Devolved Social Services Program, gaining direct operational experience with multilateral development finance.
His professional work spans fiscal policy, debt management, development planning, urban policy, climate-resilient development, and governance reform. He has collaborated with international partners including ADB, the World Bank, the European Union, and USAID, contributing to policy diagnostics, institutional reform initiatives, and evidence-based decision-making at senior levels of government.
Dr. Bhatti writes regularly on governance, institutions, and public policy for national and international audiences. His work emphasizes a central theme: sustainable development depends less on slogans or projects and more on credible institutions, professional governance, and accountability that travels upward. He is the founder of GovInstitutional Sense, a policy blog dedicated to strengthening governance discourse in developing countries.
Dr. Bhatti’s work bridges rigorous economic analysis with real-world policy implementation. He focuses on why reforms succeed or fail in practice – and how institutional design, political incentives, and administrative capacity shape development outcomes.