Reality of ‘war on drugs’
If politics makes strange bedfellows, politics and drugs produce even stranger ones. The partnership between drug trafficking and national politics has taken a truly bizarre turn in the fight against…
Emerging market status – I
One lesson that Federal Finance Minister Ishaq Dar refuses to learn at the cost of his eroding credibility is that his audience comprises of qualified economists and mostly the educated…
Asia-Europe economic cooperation
Of the several interesting seminars, I recently attended at Frankfurt the one on Asian European integration was extremely forward looking in its content. It sported prominent panellists, including our own…
Economics in Urdu
A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. But there are words and then there are words. Take the case of Begum Nusrat Bhutto who was a member of…
Refugees: key to Europe’s future
Dubai eye The writer is a Middle East based columnist. The past couple of weeks have been rather traumatic. I found myself hanging between the extremes of hope and despair,…
The data controversy
Official statistics are a public trust. Much of the edifice (if not all) of government policy effort and action should be rested on the foundations of accurate, credible, transparent, accountable…
Cotton crisis
Pakistan’s economy is in grave trouble. According to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2015-16, it failed to meet the growth target of 5.5pc in FY2016. GDP grew by 4.7 pc. This…
Dubai syndrome in Indo-Pak rivalry
There seems to be a pervasive belief in Pakistan that India is somehow being indulged by the West, chiefly the United States, because of Delhi’s new money power or its…
Saudi scapegoats
The eleventh day of September 2001 seems a distant memory now. On that day, 19 hijackers unleashed mayhem in the skies over the United States of America. Fifteen of these…
Crisis of the left
Over the last few years, quite a few countries have witnessed the rise of social movements against inequality, xenophobia, and fiscal austerity. The most notable of these are the Occupy…
