Pakistan's biggest export is Pakistanis

This chart opens in FY18, the last year Pakistan clearly earned more from selling goods abroad than from the wages its workers sent home: $23.2 billion against $19.9. Remittances crossed exports in the Covid year and the two lines then ran as near-twins through boom and bust — $31.8 against $31.3 billion in FY22, $27.7 against $27.3 in the crisis year, $30.7 against $30.3 in FY24. The tracking is no coincidence: they are two prices of the same asset, Pakistani labour. One sells the labour's output abroad as goods. The other sells the labour itself, and the wages come home as transfers.

Then the lines parted. Exports finished FY26 at $30.8 billion — below where they stood four years earlier. Remittances rose to $38.3 billion, then to a record $41.6 billion: more than a third larger than goods exports, and the country's biggest source of foreign exchange by a distance. This issue's lead story argues that Pakistan's growth adds workers without raising output per worker. The divergence in this chart is that argument measured in dollars. An economy that cannot make its workers more productive at home exports the workers instead. Abroad, the same workers produce far more, because they work with better tools in better-run economies, and part of what they earn comes home as the flow that keeps the current account near balance.

Two things temper the chart. Remittances respond to policy as much as to diaspora incomes: the FY23 dip was largely an exchange-rate gap pushing money into informal channels, and part of the surge since is those flows returning to the banks. And the two lines are not equivalents. Remittances might settle the import bill, but the productivity behind them belongs to the host economies. Exports are the only line on this chart that pays Pakistan for productivity at home — and it is the one that has not moved.