Modify your search
Modify your search
Volume
Issues
Published:July - Dec 1998
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.
Mandatory Rules of Law in International Business Arbitration
S.M. Hyder Razvi
Published:July - Dec 1998
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.
Published:July - Dec 1998
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.
Science and Economic Development Conference (The Conference Report)
Irfan ul Haque
Published:July - Dec 1998
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.
Published:July - Dec 1998
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 and its Effects: An Overvalued Quantity?
Sikander Rahim
Published:July - Dec 1998
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.
Published:July - Dec 1998
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.
Book Reviews: Structural Adjustment, Global Trade and the New Political Economy of Development
Mir Annice Mahmood
Published:July - Dec 1998
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.
Dynamics of Agricultural Productivity and Poverty in Pakistan
S.M. Turab Hussain & Mohammad Ishfaq
Published:Jan - June 1998
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.
Published:Jan - June 1998
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.