A hundred days: worth a thousand words
An official front page ad, bearing the solitary caption “We’ve been busy”, asked bewildered readers to “turn the page for Naya Pakistan”. The next page boasted “progress worth a thousand…
Poverty by design
ACCORDING to the World Bank’s new poverty estimates, 44.7 per cent of Pakistan’s population (around 110 million) now lives in poverty. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty has risen…
Taxation to stagnation
Budget 2025-26, tabled in the National Assembly on June 10 and nearly drowned out by opposition slogans, has dominated talk shows and tax seminars ever since. Two professional gatherings –…
Eroding bases of power
THIS is not how it works. The biggest folly that any wielder of power can fall prey to is to take their own power for granted. It does not work…
Concessions, debt & reforms
THE FBR had been publishing its Tax Expenditure Report since 2020. Each report estimates the ‘tax expenditure’, ie, the tax foregone or the revenue loss because of the built-in tax concessions and…
NFC: call for fiscal reforms
In an analysis of the 7th NFC Award (‘Fiscal realities: A case for NFC reform’, March 20), published on these pages, I showed that provincial governments collect a small fraction…
Depleting reserves
As of August 2021, net reserves with the SBP stood at $20 billion. Net reserves with the SBP have since fallen to $12 billion. Over the past seven months, the…
An economic forecast
The economic problems Pakistan faces right now are similar to what the PTI had faced. In 2019, with low foreign exchange reserves and high deficits, the PTI government had failed…
Asia’s unequal face
Extreme concentration of income, wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny male minority is tearing our societies apart, depriving opportunities for the majority, warming up the planet,…
Unmasking the ‘Mafias’
Lately the so-called ‘Mafias’ are being increasingly blamed for almost all the ills that the national economy is currently suffering from. They are being particularly accused of hoarding, black marketing…
