False prestige
So addicted is the Indian power elite to being treated as the representative of an unstoppable rising great power that it finds the recent decline in India’s global stature and…
Washington’s nuclear agenda
The Pakistan-US joint statement on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s visit to Washington last month contains a section on ‘Non-proliferation, Nuclear Security and Strategic Stability’. As noted by Michael Krepon of…
Asian tigers and paper tigers
An important new book explains why some countries have become economic tigers in East Asia while others are relative failures or paper tigers. ‘How Asia Works’ by Joe Studwell is…
Medium or message?
It was the late 1980s and the early 1990s. There was a municipal committee-run secondary school in Gujjar Khan, district Rawalpindi, which was seen as the best girls’ school in…
Battling imbalances
When selecting policy instruments and the timing of interventions, a key question that bedevils decision-makers in the country is how to facilitate growth and contain inflation simultaneously. It has been…
A fine balance
‘Stabilisation-first’ versus growth-stabilisation balance has been under debate ever since the approval of the new IMF programme for Pakistan. Many, this writer included, are of the opinion that the IMF…
Petulant malevolence
Thirty years ago New Zealand had a prime minister called David Lange who was witty and sometimes caustic. Speaking at the dinner he hosted for retiring US ambassador H Monroe…
Curse of corruption
Criminals and terrorists evade detection, arrest and punishment by easily operating across international borders, taking full advantage of the reluctance of law-enforcement authorities to engage in complicated and expensive transnational…
Stability with growth
The stabilisation vs growth debate has been sparked by concerns that Pakistan is entering its sixth year of stagnating incomes and can no longer afford to tread the same path.…
Housing shortage threatens to sap resilience of Swedish economy
A housing shortage in Sweden is pushing up prices to levels close to those in central London and threatening to undermine one of Europe's most solid economies. For decades the…
