Five long years
I have been writing on economic issues for almost four years. In each article, the growing weaknesses of Pakistan’s economy and policy inaction have been identified and suggestions made to…
Institutional pillage
`Fiscal Neanderthals`. This is how a friend used to describe the finance and FBR bureaucracy and their parliamentary `handlers` after each bout of resistance to tax reform and the introduction…
Limits of strategy
The government can influence the growth rate primarily by providing an adequate physical and social infrastructure and creating the policy and institutional environment for privatesector investment. The reasons for the…
Missing the target
There are too many large untargeted subsidies in Pakistan that are wasting a lot of resources due to their untargeted nature. The wheat subsidy goes to all the people who…
The IMF’s visit
The IMF mission that was in Islamabad ostensibly to discuss the contours of the next programme has gone back to Washington. This scribe has been struggling to understand why they…
Winds of change (Part III)
The traumatic recent developments involving the long march to Islamabad of over a hundred thousand persons expressing their deep frustrations at the present political system reflect the agony of the…
Jobs for votes
As the story goes, a distant relation of a nawab once begged him for a job. The nawab, in his infinite generosity appointed him head of the treasury. When it…
Winds of change
Much is being written and said about Dr Tahirul Qadri – his background and his motivations. Some claim that he is an agent of foreign countries with the objective of…
Our growth diagnostics
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina opens with this line. This dictum holds true not only for…
Going around in circles
Given the state of the writ of the state in Pakistan, finding civil servants with happy faces is a rarity these days. But lately I have found plenty of them.
