The bankers
The release this past April of the World Bank's 2014 Findex report was a major wake-up call for Pakistan. Less than 10 percent of Pakistani adults have an account at…
Who should make policy?
‘INCREMENTAL’ budgeting is generally practised by the government of Pakistan. That means that the Ministry of Finance’s recurrent budgets are not based on costing the latest development plans but, in…
Hooked on hopium
Though commonly used by stock traders to describe the tendency to keep holding a stock as it plummets in value, the word ‘hopium’, a portmanteau of hope and opium, nicely…
The way forward for Pakistan
“Rather than going cap-in-hand asking for new finance, the new government and its backers in the establishment and business would need to design first their own plans worth investing in,…
Challenges before the new finance minister
President Asif Ali Zardari has taken oath from the newly-inducted Federal Cabinet headed by second time Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif. Among the 19-member cabinet, 13 are members of…
Developing with a cultural lag
Cultural lag is a condition in a society where one aspect of culture is out of kilter with another to which it is related. As a result, society falls between…
The ‘tameer’ of leadership
I wanted to write this week’s column on the amazing story of Tameer Bank as narrated in a new book by Nadeem Hussain, who was the founder and CEO of…
Leadership crisis
Pakistan, my (our) beloved country is older than me. It is only with great reluctance that I placed ‘our’ within brackets in the opening line, the hesitation in using “our”…
Covid-19 and ‘Green New Deal’ — I
The multiple failings of neoliberal agenda since its beginnings in the late 1970s - manifested in economic policies, including those of structural adjustment programmes by multilateral institutions like International Monetary…
Collapse of an elitist state
IN common parlance, an elitist state is one where the benefits of economic growth are disproportionately appropriated by a small sliver of the population at the expense of the majority…
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