Not out of the woods
For some it’s the new El Dorado. Foreign investors are lining up to do business in Myanmar, a once-pariah nation which only a couple of years ago was almost as…
Pakistan’s economy – I
Alongsides is the first part of a three-part series by an economist who has reflected on his more than half a century involvement with the country's economy. Pakistan has had…
Good news?
Sir Michael Barber, a British educationist, has good news for all of us, or at least he claims so in his recently published report ‘Good News from Pakistan’. The report…
Fiscal priorities
What can the caretaker administration do to bring much-needed sanity to the fiscal framework? With a backdrop of a record budget deficit of around 10 per cent of GDP staring…
Foreign investment
Four features of Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s budget stand out. First, thanks to its obsession with reducing the fiscal deficit, the budget fails to raise social-sector expenditure – just when…
Between peril and promise
What is the state of Pakistan`s economy? Or, perhaps of greater relevance, the broader state of the `union`? Each year, the highly-regarded and widely followed annual report of the State…
It is patronage, stupid!
The story goes that the Italian Christian Democratic Party had a very elaborate system of patronage and vote-buying. It devised innovative methods to ensure that people voted as per promise…
The care they can take
The constitution is silent on the precise role of the caretaker government. There is a general agreement that the caretaker setup should not take any action that favors one political…
Our growth diagnostics
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina opens with this line. This dictum holds true not only for…
Performance or…
On the 27th of December, 2012, Benazir Bhutto's fifth death anniversary, a major political event took place with Bilawal Bhutto Zardari addressing those who came to pay their respects to…
