A futile debate
According to recent media reports, opinions in the Planning Commission (PC) and the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) are poles apart over how to sort out the current fiscal and…
Of empowerment
One fine morning in the early days of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rule, I found myself in the company of family elders where, Nizam Din, tenant of our small…
Quaid’s vision of foreign policy
The Founder of Pakistan Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had envisioned the newly independent Muslim state's foreign policy to be one of "peace with all, and enmity with none". Pakistan must…
Agenda for the nation 2013 and beyond-III
Over the past five years, extremely bad governance wrought with corruption and compromise in the name of continuity of democracy has brought the country to a disastrous point. This has…
Individual vs the system
The emphasis a new generation of puritans is placing on the personal qualities of candidates for elective offices has revived the debate on what matters more in politics — the…
Rescuing Enlightenment universals
The postmodernist assault on Enlightenment, launched in the 1980s, was assisted by postcolonialism. Branching out of Cultural Studies, the latter started as a metropolitan academic attempt to surpass the marginalisation…
Human hybrids in economic system
What is more important - knowledge of economics as taught and practised in the West or Wisdom as practised in the East or local level ethics? Pakistan has always been…
France runs into German wall on EU growth drive
State Bank of Pakistan's (SBP) latest Monetary Policy Statement (MPS) reflects a realisation that cutting interest rate can't compensate for the rise in a variety of other costs of doing…
Debt and fiscal policy statements 2012-13
Two important documents, namely, Fiscal Policy Statement and Debt Policy Statement for 2012-13, released on 4th February 2013 by the Debt Policy Co-ordination Office of Ministry of Finance, while expressing…
Everything’s almost free in Spain’s parallel barter economy
It can be argued that extra-judicial interventions first by Ghulam Mohammad as Governor General in 1951 and later by military regimes and disregard of the Constitution - facilitated by either…
