Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the contending role of important external inflows on the economic growth of Pakistan economy. The main purpose behind focusing on Pakistan is that it is receiving significant inflows from different international sources such as International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Asian Development Bank. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted the autoregressive distributed lag cointegration approach for the purpose of exploring the long-run cointegrating relationship among the variables. As Pakistan Government had been implementing some major liberalization policies during 1990s, data from 1976 to 2018 is used to estimate the specified models to reflect the impact of the surge of foreign inflows occurring from that time. In addition, error correction model is estimated for examining the short-run relationships. Findings: The findings revealed the significant role played by different inflows in accelerating the economic growth. According to results, in the long run, all inflows, for example, Foreign direct investment (FDI), debt, official developdment assistance and remittances, have influenced significantly and positively the economic growth. The two control variables such as inflation and employment level included in the model have also played their expected role in the growth process. In the short run, some of the variables such as remittances, FDI and inflation rate have lost their significance level while for debt, aid and employment level, the signs of their coefficients become reversed. Practical implications: Based on the findings, the study suggests the policymakers of Pakistan economy to liberalize the economy and attract more inflows from the external sources to accelerate economic growth. Originality/value: To the best of the authors� knowledge, this is the first comprehensive empirical study on the role of foreign inflows in the process of economic growth in the context of Pakistan economy. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.