Residual thoughts on FY24 budget
The budget 2023-24 envisages 23.7 billion dollars of external borrowing – an amount premised on a rupee dollar parity averaging 290 rupees to the dollar – a condition that would…
The great Indian political circus: Part – I
There are many similarities between the economic situation that India faced in the early 1990s and the one Pakistan currently faces. Last year, I wrote a series of articles that…
Gross financing, and medium-term economic strategy
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Country Report No. 22/288, released in September 2022 – the last such report released, since there have been no successful programme reviews completed since then, given…
FY23: Uncovering drivers of economic performance
The National Account numbers for FY2023 have been published and, unfortunately, they paint a truly dismal picture of economic performance. Under the PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement) government, economic activity has…
A crisis can be an opportunity
I hope that the situation Pakistan is currently witnessing will be the worst it gets, with no further escalation. We were already facing a crippling economic crisis, an unprecedented political…
Causes of the rising inflation
The rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), has been persistently rising since September 2022, on a year-to-year basis. It was 23.2 percent in September 2022…
Contrasting trends
The economy is showing contrasting trends in different segments of activity. This is due to various factors like the severe stagflation, looming uncertainty, varying degree of success of policies and…
Critical economic challenges
Pakistan’s recent economic crisis, brewing since last few years, intensified in the last quarter of fiscal year (FY) 2022 on account of unsustainable economic measures. This has diminished a large…
Pakistan, and international global financial order
In the recently released report ‘Regional Economic Outlook: Middle East and Central Asia’ by International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of its comments on Pakistan’s economy was ‘For… Pakistan, policy interest…
Serious economic crisis due to austerity policies, and weak multilateralism
Inadequate provision of International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) special drawing rights (SDRs) to Pakistan, like in many developing countries, after an initial allocation from $650 billion released in August 2021 –…
