Fiscal mess – straighten the priorities
Budget-making is in the process. This one is a tough budget to make. Covid-19 demands stimulus; but the fiscal deficit is already too high. The government is asking for no…
Consensus NFC award divisive after 10 years
The federal budget 2020-21 envisages a provincial surplus of 242 billion rupees, an amount credited to its receipts to reach the projected budget deficit for next fiscal year of 7…
Wanted: fiscal incentives for digitization
The world is moving towards a cashless economy whereas cash-based transactions are rampant in Pakistan. Ratio of currency in circulation to bank deposits has always been high in the country…
Current economic trends
The first six months of 2021-22 have come to an end. This is an appropriate time to identify the ongoing economic trends from the viewpoint of assessing the prospects for…
2022: year of essential economic reform
There is a lot of spilt milk in terms of lost time to initiate meaningful, broad-based institutional, organizational, and market reforms, to take the economy away from an overall neoliberal/Washington-consensus…
SDRs: Allocation, reallocation, and fiscal usage
Writing in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2009 in a Project Syndicate published article ‘The new IMF’, the then executive director of the International Monetary Fund…
2020-21 – the year of pandemic
The three-year ceremony of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf (PTI) government held at the imposing conference centre in Islamabad and addressed by Prime Minister Imran Khan focused, as expected, on what he…
Fiscal federalism
The stagnant fiscal space and mounting debt repayment requirements pose enormous challenges to long-run fiscal sustainability. Apart from budgetary space and debt obligations, the rules of the game defined under…
Fiscal policy and economic growth
Fiscal policy is an important tool of modern governments to steer economy in right direction. All governments, specially in emerging markets, endeavour to align their fiscal policies in the manner…
Fiscal outcome 1st quarter, 2017-18
The information on fiscal operations in the first quarter of 2017-18 of the federal and provincial governments has been released recently by the Federal Ministry of Finance (MoF). The figures…
