The assumption that people were to be given theatre was of course in keeping with the government fiction that people were to be given development particularly if they behaved themselves. (Wa Thiong’o, 1986:41) Despite our short history, the norms of scholarship in Pakistan have already become well entrenched: the grooves already seem so deep that digging ourselves out of them may present some difficulties. (One example of that in the social sciences generally, and political science and history in particular, is the retelling of the major historical events and noting major trends without offering any remarkably new interpretations). The need, in other words, of newer and different understanding of where we are and how we got there is considerable. One purpose of introducing Escobar’s (1997) Encountering Development and related materials is to offer an opportunity to get out of these academic ruts. Specifically, two exits are simultaneously provided by Escobar; one lets us interrogate the dominant narrative of development, and the other enables us to consider the possibilities that postmodernism opens up. He applies the latter to the former, which is an uncomplicated way to make what is valuable in postmodernism clear and accessible. (In what follows, the numbers in parenthesis refer to pages in Escobar’s work).
KEYWORDS: Development, postmodernism, international organisations, Third World, colonialism.
JEL: N/A.

Of all mankind’s adventures in search of peace and justice, arbitration is amongst the earliest. Long before law was established, or courts were organised, or judges had formulated principles of law, man had resorted to arbitration for the resolution of discord, the adjustment of differences and the settlement of disputes. One of the recurring themes in International Business Arbitration is the tension between the will of the parties and the ability of states of regulate the conduct of arbitration proceedings. The general trend in international commercial arbitration is to respect, within limits, the will of the parties regarding the choice of law and the procedure for carrying out their arbitration. Thus, party autonomy is recognised as one of the cardinal elements of international business arbitration.
KEYWORDS: International business arbitration, proceedings, arbitration international, arbitration, disputes.
JEL: N/A.

This study raises policy issues arising from the fact that the present tax-expenditure policies and institutional set-up at both the provincial and local government levels of the Province of the Punjab are dated and need revision. There is now an active awareness within the Punjab Province that substantial changes are necessary. The broad outlines of these required changes which have been identified in this study, as follows: i) The Provincial Government needs to recognise that the 1997 National Finance Commission (NFC) Award’s projected high level of Federal Divisible Pool Revenues are unlikely to materialise in the light of the substantial changes made in tax policies by the post 1997- Award Federal Government as well as by the depressed state of the economy. As a result the historical pattern of Federal Transfers covering more than 85 per cent of consolidated Punjab Provincial and Local Government expenditures is unlikely to be ever repeated. In fact the 1997-98 coverage of 75 per cent is likely to go down even further and this gap needs to be filled by active resource mobilisation and expenditure curtailment measures.
KEYWORDS: Fiscal resources, tax collection, local governments, provincial governments, income tax, provincial excises, finances, provincial revenues.
JEL: N/A.

A conference on Science and Economic Development was held at Hotel Pearl Continental, Lahore on 1-2 December, 1997. The event was sponsored and organised by the Lahore School of Economics. The World Bank provided a grant to help meet the cost of participant travel and subsistence. The conference brought together Pakistan’s leading businessmen, scientists, engineers, and economists to discuss and develop ideas on how to improve Pakistan’s state of science and technology (S&T) capabilities with a view to accelerating the country’s pace of economic development, strengthening its competitive position in the global economy, and preparing it for the challenges of the 21st century. The conference calendar and the list of participants can be found in the Annex.
KEYWORDS: Conference report, science, Pakistan, economic development, promotion of science and technology, national system of innovation.
JEL: N/A.

The Annual Confidential Report is a government document and is used by all government departments. The document is used for all employees of Grade 16 and above. The same document is used for the teaching staff as well. The inefficiency of the document to present an appropriate appraisal of scholarship characteristics of the higher education academic staff is evident. This study will focus on identifying various factors that ought to be assessed to provide information about the performance of the teaching staff and help formulate an effective format to achieve the objectives of appraisal.
KEYWORDS: Higher Education, Pakistan, Higher Education Academic Staff, HEAS.
JEL: N/A.

The exchange rate poses an awkward problem; if the same goods are produced by and traded between different countries and if international trade is competitive, the prices of such goods in any country will be the same, regardless of the country of origin. The law of one price must hold within each country; exchange rate movements cannot alter the relative prices in the same country of competing goods according to country of origin. There is, then, no general a priori reason why purchasers in a given country should choose the product of one country rather than the competing product of another and the standard argument, that changes in exchange rates alter the volumes of imports and exports through such relative price changes, cannot hold for such goods. The conclusion is that, if most of the imports and exports of a country are goods that have international competition, there is no reason that exchange rate changes will have predictable effects on its balance of trade
KEYWORDS: Exchange rate, balance of goods, unemployment, trade, price comparison, imported and domestic goods.
JEL: N/A.

The state of Pakistan appears to have embarked upon a process of transforming itself. It faces a host of grave socio-political and economic issues which manifestly do not yield to the traditional style of governance. It has also realised that its decayed and outdated administrative system cannot enable it to discharge its social sector obligations even on the limited scale the population has become used to. Thus, on the one hand, it is availing of the opportunities afforded by the rhetoric of globalisation and market economy, and withdrawing from whatever social responsibilities to the people it hitherto recognised - in the areas of education, health, employment, communications, public utilities, etc. On the other hand, it is trying to reinforce its coercive powers through increased reliance on majoritarianism, authoritarian approaches to issues generally reserved for democratic decision-making, and short-circuiting of judicial processes.
KEYWORDS: Comment, Civil society, Pakistan, representative government, institutional safeguards.
JEL: N/A.

Biplab Dasgupta. Structural Adjustment Global Trade and the New Political Economy of Development. New Delhi. Sage Publications. 1998. Price Indian Rupees 450 (hardback). The author has written a very topical book the relevance of which cannot be understated. At the core of the book the author discusses the concept of the new political economy of development which forms the theoretical underpinnings that lie behind the structural adjustment/ stabilisation programmes of the international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Biplab Dasgupta has very concisely and succinctly analysed the new political economy of development which has, as its centre-piece, a blind faith in the operation of free-market forces. This can be traced back to the Reagan and Thatcher years, which saw a shift away from interventionist policies to allowing the markets to decide.
KEYWORDS: Book review, structural adjustment, Pareto-optimality, political economy of development, developing countries.
JEL: N/A.

This paper addresses two topics which essentially compliment each other. The first is the empirical investigation of the relationship between aggregate agricultural productivity and poverty in Pakistan through the course of time. The second is the estimation of the central inputs or determinants of agricultural production, again on an aggregate level and through time. The main empirical findings of this research suggest that increases in agricultural productivity have alleviated poverty in Pakistan but not to the extent to which the negative forces of a high population growth and increasing food prices have worsened its incidence. In the case of the determinants of agricultural productivity, the results show that accompanied with the size of the cropped area, fertiliser off-take has played the most significant and powerful role in increasing agricultural productivity through time in Pakistan, especially at the onset of the Green Revolution __ the introduction of High Yield Variety crops and seeds in the late sixties.
KEYWORDS: Agricultural productivity, rural poverty, Pakistan, alleviation of poverty.
JEL: N/A.

The crisis in East Asia has tempered the loud enthusiasm of many economists, magazines and multilateral institutions for unbridled international flows of capital. Since its start some prominent economists and financiers have expressed doubts that market mechanisms, left to themselves, necessarily end with a desirable outcome. Perhaps this is the first step to questioning whether free flows of capital between countries are desirable at all. Oddly enough, despite all that has been written in textbooks and journals extolling international capital flows and all the romanticisation of ‘globalisation’ in television advertisements, there appears to be no systematic examination of the gains and losses to be expected from them. One reason may be that economic theory, as it stands now, is ill suited to carrying out such an examination. International economic theory has two strands, the one to explain how trade in finished products and raw materials is determined by comparative advantages and the other, using quite separate assumptions, to explain the balance of payments. In the former it is assumed that capital flows are negligible, in the latter they do little more than accommodate trade imbalances. Neither address the question of what determines capital movements or what their effects might be.
KEYWORDS: Globalisation, market mechanisms, balance of payments, economic development, capital movements, trade barriers..
JEL: N/A.