The writer is a former member of the prime minister’s economic advisory council, and heads a macroeconomic consultancy based in Islamabad.
THE new finance minister has expressed exasperation at the conditionality of the ongoing IMF programme Pakistan’s 23rd since 1950. The main thrust of the programme is focused on achieving a primary fiscal surplus that is consistent with a sustainable path of public debt; building external account buffers, and making the power sector financially viable. Prima facie, and in a high-level ‘strategic’ sense, the conditionality appears aligned with Pakistan’s main structural weaknesses.
That these weaknesses have persisted, and indeed worsened, over a period of four decades is testament to how comfortably numb Pakistan’s elites have been despite the country lurching from crisis to crisis. The country’s elites have been cushioned by external aid flows and their disinterest and inaction conditioned by strong policy capture; hence, they h
پشاور کہانی: بھول بھلیاں ۔۔۔
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探討三方合作 實現共同發展
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Visitors and staff wearing protective face masks walk down the Main Street of Disneyland Paris in Marne-la-Vallee on the outskirts of Paris last year. Disneyland Paris, normally Europe’s biggest tourist attraction hosts a mass Covid vaccination site at its convention centre as France seeks to speed up its inoculation drive, officials said last week. The amusement park east of the capital has been closed since October 30, when non-essential businesses were ordered to close amid a surge in infections, putting its 17,000 employees out of work. AFP
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