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…
The last budget
The outgoing government presented its fifth and last budget on June 1, 2012. Since the year 2012-13 was an election year, the intention of the government was totally inconsistent with…
Second ‘Shareholder Spring’ unlikely to bloom in Europe
While politicians and public have fulminated against lottery-sized pay awards in Europe's boardrooms, fund firms, which wield the real power, are less concerned by such excesses and unlikely to use…
Texas grid braces for possible power company restructuring
The Texas power grid, already struggling to attract new generation to avoid rolling outages as demand grows, now may have to cope with a potential restructuring of the largest owner…
Smart grids
Pakistan's electricity infrastructure has served the country well for the past several decades. However, with the passage of time and rapidly increasing demand, it is fast approaching its limitations. This…
Politics and the pipeline
The ground-breaking ceremony for the Pakistan section of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline last Monday was an event of high symbolic importance. It was designed to seal Pakistan’s commitment to finally…
An interim agenda
By any standards the interim government, whose outlines are now beginning to appear, has a heavy agenda and a light mandate. This is a bad combination. Here is some of…
Pipeline politics
The only existing gas pipeline in Pakistan is the Sui gas distribution network that has supplied Pakistani homes, factories and power plants for the past four decades. Pakistan is a…
Tax reform proposals
Pakistan has one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios even amongst the bottom ranked developing nations. The following statistics are indicative of the unexploited potential for additional revenue generation. Whereas there…
A new IMF programme
The International Monetary Fund team is seemingly all set to revisit Islamabad soon armed with a new programme for our acquiescence, as we struggle to discharge our dues to them…
