Kanchan Chopra & S. C. Gulati, Migration, Common Property Resources and Environmental Degradation: Interlinkages in India’s Arid and Semi-arid Regions; SAGE Publications, New Delhi, 2000. pps 164. Price Rs. (Indian) 350/-. This book tries to develop linkages between poverty, environmental degradation, and migration. The premise is that poverty leads to environmental degradation, and degradation of natural resources in rural areas, which results in ‘degradation’ pushed ‘imigration’ to urban areas and this also happens to be the major cause of the degradation. The book uses a complex set of hypotheses, which have been tested with primary data inputs from field-based surveys in Rajasthan, India.
KEYWORDS: Book review, India, poverty, migration, environmental degradation, policy recommendation.
JEL: N/A.

Tasneem Ahmad Siddiqui, Towards Good Governance, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2001, Price: Pak Rs. 495/-. Tasneem Ahmad Siddiqui is a bureaucrat turned author and that in itself speaks volumes about the book under discussion. It is an absorbing and refreshing publication, but somewhat lacking in expression. It is amply apparent that the author has his heart in the right place and the ideas are sound and convincing. In essence, though replete with insights and jarring home truths, it is an exhaustive litany of laments and then, eureka, the author has simple, easy to follow solutions to all the ills plaguing Pakistani society. The saving grace of course is that unlike the majority of Cassandralike intellectuals of whom there is no dearth, Siddiqui hopes against hope and sees a plausible way out of the morass.
KEYWORDS: Book review, good governance, mechanisms, Pakistan.
JEL: N/A.

The economics profession has recently started to give increased recognition to the need for restraining capital movements and exercising greater care in opening up capital accounts in developing countries.1 This is a significant development, for, not long ago, unfettered flow of capital across countries was being hailed as a means for improving global efficiency and promoting world welfare. At its annual meetings in 1997, the IMF had pushed to incorporate capital account convertibility into its Articles of Agreement. However, the gravity of the East Asian crisis drove home the dangers inherent in premature deregulation of financial markets and freeing of capital movements, at least as far as developing countries are concerned.
KEYWORDS: open trade regimes, free capital mobility, market liberalism, exchange controls, capital account.
JEL: N/A.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. States should undertake, at the national level, all necessary measures for the realization of the right to development and shall ensure, inter-alia, equality of opportunity for their access to basic resources, education, health services, food, housing, employment and the fair distribution of income. Effective measures should be undertaken to ensure that women have an active role in the development process. Appropriate economic and social reforms should be carried out with a view to eradicating all social injustices. Article 8.1 of Declaration of the Right to Development adopted by the General Assembly Resolution 41.28 on 4 December 1986.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, social development, economic development, standard of living, equal opportunity, Constitution of Pakistan.
JEL: N/A.

The Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) of Ross [1976] is one of the most important building blocks of modern asset pricing theory, and the prime alternative to the celebrated Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) of Sharpe [1964], Lintner [1965], and others. This paper briefly reviews the theoretical underpinnings underlying the APT and highlights the econometric techniques used to test the APT with pre-specified macroeconomic factors. Besides this, the prime objective of this study is to perform an empirical test of the APT in the Pakistani stock market by using pre-specified macroeconomic factors and employing Iterative NonLinear Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (ITNLSUR). These empirical results will be, hopefully, helpful for corporate managers undertaking cost of capital calculations, for domestic and international fund managers making investment decisions and, amongst others, for individual investors who wish to assess the performance of managed funds.
KEYWORDS: Arbitrage Pricing Theory,  Capital Asset Pricing Mode, Pakistan, arbitrage portfolio, macroeconomic factors.
JEL: N/A.

During the last three decades, the Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis (REH) has been an important theme of economic research both theoretical and applied in the industrial countries especially the US. However, very limited work has been done in the developing countries to test the validity and consistency of this hypothesis. In this paper an attempt has been made to present some empirical tests of the hypothesis for Pakistan using the macroeconomic data for the period 1960-88 based on the standard Blanchard-Evans Models of intertemporal allocation of resources as affected by the perceptions of the consumers about debt accumulation. The paper has been divided into three parts. In part-I, a brief introduction to the Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis as well its origins has been delineated. In part-II, the Blanchard (1985) Model has been outlined along with the testable hypotheses as derived by Evans (1988). Part-III summarily presents the results of the Blanchard-Evans Models as applied to Pakistan data. These results fail to validate the Ricardian Equivalence Hypotheses for Pakistan. However the results are sensitive to the manner in which the critical variable namely “wealth” is defined and the manner in which the models are estimated. Therefore, further research is required on the subject especially in the contest of Pakistan’s economy which has accumulated large public debt so as to analyse precisely the extent to which public debt is discounted by the consumers as future tax liabilities.
KEYWORDS: Ricardian Equivalence, Pakistan, Blanchard-Evans Models.
JEL: N/A.

Federal Minister for Labour Manpower and Overseas Pakistanis, Omar Asghar Khan has announced the draft of the labour policy. The policy focuses on the law to eliminate child labour in the country. According to the Minister the law would be implemented from January 2001 and before the year 2005 there would be no child or bonded labour in Pakistan. Moreover, Under ILO obligation Pakistan has to achieve the objective of elimination of child and bonded labour by the year 2005. ILO plans to impose sanctions on the exports of those countries where child and bonded labour continues. Furthermore, the country has to abide with the convention of the International Labour Organization as a member of this club1. Most of the studies about child labour in Pakistan are based on micro-data. The present study/survey is another addition to the previous studies with some additional variables. The focus of the study is socioeconomic aspects of child labour in auto-workshops, as 18 per cent of child labour is engaged in this establishment2 . Some comparisons between the conclusions of the present survey and that of the previous ones have also been made. On the basis, policy recommendations have also been proposed.
KEYWORDS: Child labour, Pakistan, ILO, legislation.
JEL: N/A.

credit? This question has acquired some urgency in the wake of the recent Shariat Court ruling banning interest in Pakistan. Some pundits have pronounced that great harm will result from the banning of interest1. Actually, such pronouncements are based on a lack of understanding of both the modern economic system, as well as the nature of the Islamic prohibition of interest. As we hope to demonstrate clearly below, the modern economy can function very well, indeed better in some ways2, with a prohibition on interest rate payments of the Islamic type.
KEYWORDS: Interest-based credit, modern economy, Islamic system, bank credit, Pakistan.
JEL: N/A.

This study explores the obstacles facing Saudi exporters of non-oil products. The sampling frame comprised 411 firms, which have been involved in exporting for at least two years as identified by the Saudi Export Development Center. The research has investigated twenty five obstacles that have some relation to non-oil export products. Competition with foreign firms was found to be the first obstacle with the highest mean of (3.212) followed by lack of information about potential export markets with a mean of (2.887). Moreover, with regard to the ways Saudi exporters might overcome these obstacles, the investigations suggested to Saudi exporting firms fifteen factors that might improve Saudi non-oil exporting products.
KEYWORDS: Saudi, crude oil, non-oil, exports, competition, targeted markets.
JEL: N/A.

This paper is concerned with the quantification of the rate of capacity utilisation and its major determinants in the large-scale manufacturing sector of Pakistan. A cross-section analysis has been made for 68 five digit industries for the period 1995-96. A number of hypothesis have been tested using the regression technique. Keeping in view the problem of load shedding in Pakistan, it has been taken as an important variable affecting the rate of capacity utilisation in the manufacturing sector. Regression results are in conformity with the earlier studies that supply factors are playing a major role in determining the rate of capacity utilisation. Among supply factors electricity consumption has appeared to be statistically significant.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, manufacturing, capacity utilisation, models, positive relationship.
JEL: N/A.