Traditionally, five year plans suggest an indicative set of policies to achieve medium-term targets. Operarionalisation of these policies, however, takes place through annual plans and budgets, formulation of trade and monetary policies and fiscal measures deemed necessary and announced during the course of a year, the so-called mini-budgets. In recent years, while five year plans have increasingly been seen as analytical frameworks for consistency rather than tight blueprints for disciline, there have been demands, especially from the private sector, that economic policies should be announced for a medium term. Underlying this shift of emphasis are the profound changes that have occurred in economic organisation and management in the country as well as the broad sweep of the forces of rapid globalisation. Of the total fixed investment in Pakistan today, over 60 per cent originates in the private sector. Only a decade ago, the private sector share was well below 50 per cent. Similarly, foreign investment used to be an insignificant component of foreign inflows. It stood at over a billion dollars for three years in a row in the nineties. The degree of openness of the economy has also increased significantly. Exports and imports alone constitute one-third of the GDP. The impact of liberalised financial flows is in addition.
KEYWORDS: Policy continuity, five year plan, Pakistan, investment, governance, institutions.

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This article is an attempt to explain why poverty has persisted to a great extent in Pakistan, despite sustained growth of national income, and to review two publications dealing with poverty and social development, “Social Development in Pakistan: Annual Review 1999, Social Development in Economic Crisis”, published by the Social Policy and Development Centre, (SDP) and “Human Development in South Asia, 1999: The Crisis of Governance”, published by the Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre (HD).
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, poverty, policy, neo-classical theory, labour, income distribution.

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S.M. Burke and Salim Al-Din Quraishi, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, his personality and his politics, Karachi, Oxford University Press pp 412 Rs. 495/-. A convincing vindication of the Quaid’s Conversion from Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to founding father of Pakistan. A book which most Pakistanis have been waiting for for the past five years or so, has at last been published by The Oxford University Press, Karachi (1997) as part of their Jubilee Series. A dispassionate study of the Quaid’s life and his personality illustrates that he was a luminary in three different walks of life. Firstly, as one of undivided India’s renowned legal practitioners; secondly, one of it’s leading legislators and, thirdly, as one of it’s leading politicians. It is universally recognised that the Quaid attained not only world stature, but won a permanent place in world history. Through his dynamic and inspiring leadership, he not only won independence from the then British colonial rule, but had the sole distinction of altering the world map by carving into existence the largest Muslim state of its time in the comity of nations – bigger than the United Kingdom and France put together. It is the role of a leading politician which this latest publication principally deals with.
KEYWORDS: Book Review, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Hindu-Muslim.

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Pakistan is enduring a serious economic downturn and facing the probability of the collapse of the banking and financial systems. The growth outlook is meek and risk of default is hanging over the head of the nation as a sword. Banking and financial institutions and economic systems of Pakistan like that of ASEAN and other crises hit countries, suffer from bad loans, political interference, corruption, declining exports, budget and trade deficits, internal and external debts, crashes of stock exchanges, currency mismanagement, and double digit inflation. While 'survival of the fittest’ is ever a self-evident truth, the lessons of the rise and fall of nations are important for survival. In order to meet the challenge of survival, it may be crucial to learn the underlying causes that accounted for and understand the strategies and reforms that attempted to manage the economies of the countries suffering from the crises.
KEYWORDS: Banking crises, economic crises, financial systems, sustainable growth patterns, economic systems, Asia, Europe.

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Educational expenditure as a percentage of GDP has indeed been protected and over the first phase of SAP (1993-1996) has increased by about 0.2 per cent of GDP. However, despite SAP protection, it declined to the preSAP level for 1998-99. While there is evidence that, in some aspects, the gender and regional gaps have closed, the poorest continue to be excluded from schooling, the rural female income gap in schooling has widened and, if the poor do attend, they are the most likely to drop out. Also, net enrollment rates for boys and girls actually declined over the first SAP period.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, Social Action Plan, SAP, education, poverty strategy, gender, rural enrollments (sic).

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In this age of globalisation, multiple pressures are intensifying for the under developed and developing countries. It is a struggle for economic survival, where the larger fish will eat up any small fish not clever enough to learn the rules of the game. In this market oriented competitive world, management development has increasingly become linked with economic output. Additionally, education is no more just an intellectual exercise. It is compulsively being recognised as a large sector of human and financial resources, requiring strategic management and a purposeful development of the concerned personnel for quality and effectiveness.
KEYWORDS: Management development, organisational theory, education, educational institutions, organisational development.

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This paper is divided into three sections. The first section goes over the major developments in consumer choice theory1 over time and contrasts the approaches of Marshall, Hicks and Samuelson. In the second section is an inquiry into the nature of utility and a hypothesis is developed in the Marshallian tradition. The hypothesis is built on the grounds that utility is not a homegenous concept as is conventionally believed. The last section is concerned with identifying some theoretical and philosophical implications of the hypothesis for economics.
KEYWORDS: Marshall, Hicks, Samuelson, consumer choice theory, revealed preference theory.

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The informal sector plays a significant role in Pakistan’s economy as well as in other developing countries. The role of the informal sector in solving the unemployment problem of Third World countries has become the focus of a conceptual and empirical debate in recent years. Most of the research takes a favourable view of this sector and suggests that it should be used as a policy instrument for the solution of the most pressing problems of developing countries, such as unemployment, poverty, income inequalities, etc. Before proceeding further, we will define the informal sector and differentiate it from the formal sector. There are various definitions, but the one given in an ILO report (1972) is generally considered the best. According to this report, informal sector activities are ways of doing things characterised by a heterogeneous array of economic activities with relative ease of entry, reliance on indigenous resources; temporary or variable structure and family ownership of enterprises, small scale of operation, labour intensive and adapted technology, skills acquired outside the formal school system, not depending on formal financial institutions for its credit needs; unregulated and unregistered units, and not observing fixed hours/days of operation.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, informal sector, rural informal sector, developing sector, formal sector, employment, unemployment, rural women, working women.

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Few would deny that there is increasing disillusionment with democracy as practised today in Pakistan. The experience with dictatorships has been equally disenchanting. Since both dictatorships and elected governments have failed, a common refrain these days is the need to empower people through democratisation, decentralisation and opening up of new avenues for participation in politics to enable them to change their own destinies.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, power structures, role of the state, institutional structures, representation, empowerment.

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Profit sharing refers to the splitting of profit between two or more business partners. It is a substitute to the interest system where one partner gets a fixed return irrespective of business performance. In the past two decades profit sharing has captured the attention of policy makers and researchers alike. This increased interest has been roused by factors including research interests in the West, practical supremacy of the system and commitment to Islam. Martin Wietzman (1984, 1987, 1990) carried out research work on profit sharing, which gave respectability to the concept. Japan, during its boom era, used profit sharing in a small segment of the labour market. The UK passed legislation to provide tax incentives to encourage the adoption of profit - related pay schemes and following Islamic principles, a few Muslim economies attempted to modify banking practices in line with Islamic principles.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, community saving, investment, profit, loss sharing, micro level, return on investment, savers.

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The educational system in Pakistan is beset with multiple dilemmas and constraints. Some are underlying and deep-rooted, while others are rooted in immediate, superficial reasons. Understandably all are inter linked and each affects the other. One that pervades as an under current is the issue of lack of Equal Opportunity (EO) which takes myriad forms when translated into practice. This paper delineates the various forms the absence or imbalanced prevalence of EO takes within the context of the education system of the country, and primary education in particular.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, educational system, social development, statistical data, literacy, poor education indicators.

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Textile is one of the most heavily protected sector in developed countries. This paper addresses the issue of anti-dumping measures, a new form of trade restriction. Protectionism is still common place in textiles, tariffs remain high and progress in eliminating import quotas has been slow. In fact, protectionism is on the rise in a new guise: anti-dumping cases against Asian countries are multiplying in the US, EU and around the world. Pakistani textiles (yarn, unbleached grey cotton fabric and bed-linen) exports are being increasingly subjected to the initiation of anti-dumping investigations, which creates uncertainty and depresses business sentiment. Investigation periods are quite lengthy and the legal costs of defending against these cases are enormous. These result in a great loss of time that could be better spent in a productive manner. This phenomenon is a matter of great concern because it has created a damaging impact on the normal growth of trade. In fact, by merely initiating an anti-dumping case against exporting country's manufacturers, or even just threatening to do so, developed countries producers can cause extensive disruption to the market for an extended period of time. At the end of the day, whether dumping and injury are proven may no longer matter for some Asian manufacturers, who could be driven out of the market simply as a result of the case being initiated.
KEYWORDS: Anti-dumping, protectionism, WTO, Pakistan, procedural rules, ADP agreement, preliminary affirmative determination.

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Micro-finance is an idea which occurred to developing countries considerably late in the day. When during the colonial era, the modern sector and its peculiar institutional framework emerged in the South Asian continent, the system catered to the needs of the modern sector i.e. trade and industry. Agriculture did not receive the kind of attention that it deserved although colonial rule was responsible for destroying the viability of this vital sector. A compensatory effort to provide finance for the rural sector would have been in order. However, this task was left to the cooperatives and informal sources of credit. The governments in the colonial system only undertook “distress lending” in the form of Taccavi loans on a somewhat limited scale.
KEYWORDS: Micro-finance, rural credit, Third World, cheap credit, assessment, India.

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The first part of this paper showed that the neo-classical theory of international trade leads to conclusions that contradict the facts or leads to no conclusions that can be verified. The version of the theory with two factors and the same production functions in different countries has some appeal because relative abundance of factors or intensities of their use have consistent meaning and make the theory plausible, but it results in the Leontief paradox and factor price equalisation. This appeal is lost when the number of factors is greater than two or production functions are not the same in different countries; relative abundance and intensity can not be consistently ranked or their connections to the pattern of trade is not the simple one of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory. Nor does the theory have much left to say; the kind of verifiable general prediction that was possible with two factors is not possible when the factors are more than two; such conclusions as can, in principle, be drawn are specific to the general equilibrium calculated for a given set of production functions and a given set of countries, with specified factor endowments and consumer preferences.
KEYWORDS: International trade, neo-classical theory, shortcomings, specialisation, models, Heckscher-Ohlin, Haberler, Bensusan-Butt, mechanised production.

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This paper investigates wage differentials between workers in subcontracting and non-subcontracting firms, using data from a recent survey of small manufacturing firms in Gujranwala, Pakistan. The paper finds that subcontracting workers receive a high wage premium and invokes efficiency wage arguments to explain this differential. The paper argues that due to a client/vendor monitoring problem it is optimal for subcontracting firms to pay higher than the market clearing wages. The use of Heckman's two stage procedure to test for sample selection bias fails to give such evidence. A decomposition of the wage differentials indicates that endowment differentials partly explain higher wages for subcontracting workers while the bulk of this wage gap is explained by differential returns to workers' attributes.
KEYWORDS: Small manufacturing firms, Pakistan, allocation of resources, adjustment policies, competitive equilibrium model, cumulative wage growth.

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In the current era, increased attention is being paid to protect the environment in developing countries. The concern stems primarily from recent advances in information concerning health problems associated with pollution. The extent of the deep-seated dangers present has motivated detailed studies and consequent pollution abatement programmes to be adopted by several countries. However, the evaluation of projects and policy reform for environmental effects in Pakistan has been rare. The task thus is posed to provide credible estimates of the benefits that can be provided by pollution abatement, and the corresponding costs.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, automobile pollution, air pollution, environmental costs, air pollutants, gasoline, petrol, emissions, health cost estimates.

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The debate over the relationship of population and development is now more than 200 years old, starting with the treatise on population by Malthus, in 1798. The increase in population, ever since, has remained a matter of concern for economists and development planners. The most recent high point of the issue was witnessed at Cairo in September, 1994. The conference which was attended by more than 10,000 persons from all over the world ended with an agreement on the issues involved in the growth of population and the economy. The outcome was a Plan of Action for the next twenty years, which would concentrate on Reproductive Health in order to obtain, “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity in all matters relating to the reproductive system and its functions and process”. This can be a turn-around in global efforts for human health and welfare, if properly implemented.
KEYWORDS: Population growth, plan of action, poverty, industrialization, development, sustainable development, social development, Pakistan.

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Higher Education (HE) in Pakistan presents a case of the "inverted pyramid". The need of the country is to eradicate illiteracy and yet on the eve of the new millenium it stands at a humble 45 per cent. Poverty in the country is on the rise. Given the constraint of the financial resources the downward spiral is evident and yet the masses at the grassroots level could greatly benefit from increased literacy skills. Equipping them with functional literacy skills would clearly improve their quality of life. Given the two opposing trends whereby the country needs to provide massive literacy skills to its populace and the infrastructure of education heavily biased in favour of HE, an innovative approach within the education system and its mode of delivery is needed. This paper focuses on one such possibility and proposes a model to develop a link between the two to place the benefits of HE at the doorstep of the populace where it is desperately needed.
KEYWORDS: Pakistan, higher education, human development indicators, HDIs, national development programmes, community development unit, CDU, BUNYAD Literacy Community Council, BLCC.

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In recent years, the sensitive issue of child labour has received world-wide attention and has become the focus of serious discussion in developing as well as developed countries. Any exact information on child labour is usually hard to come by as most of the children work in the unorganised informal sector, which is neither regulated by labour laws nor is monitored by any organisation. These working children are usually illiterate and start working at a very early age, are inexperienced and vulnerable, they usually work long hours in deplorable conditions, have no medical cover, go without sufficient and proper food and clothing, and get little rest and recreation. In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyse the major causes of female child labour in the city of Multan and certain measures and policies have been suggested which could help in bringing an end to this inhumane practice. Legislation against child labour is not an ideal solution in a country such as Pakistan. The child labour phenomena is not as simple as it appears and needs consideration in the context of the microeconomics of the family and population growth and macroeconomics of the social security structure of a country, unemployment, underemployment, opportunity cost and productivity of formal education. There are very few studies on child labour in Pakistan and on female child labour, hardly any study can be found. Data has been collected for 60 female child labourers, employed as maidservants, baby sitters and other household activities etc. Most of these female children work in the houses of educated and well off people who are usually against child labour. This exploitation of child labour cannot be stopped by child labour laws only. In this regard, other measures such as more facilities for education and vocational training are indispensable. A group of social volunteers comprising workers, employers, government officers, media experts, members of non-government organisations and educationists should make earnest and sincere efforts to achieve the objective of minimising child labour and improve their living conditions as much as possible.
KEYWORDS: Child labour, Pakistan, female child labour, legislation, unemployment, formal education, literature, education policy.

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The obvious fact of female under-representation in educational management across cultures and nations is mentioned in every relevant study. Interestingly this phenomenon transcends the dichotomies such as developed/under-developed, Eastern/Western, Muslim/non-Muslim, First/ Third World countries. Variations are more often due to situational differences. For example, the percentage of female representation in higher education management for the U.S., Britain and China as given by Lyn Davies is respectively 24, 13, and 26 per cent (1992-6; Also see Coleman: 1996), 20-30 per cent in Pakistan (Ibid:4). These statistics could be misleading for generalisation purposes if it is assumed that a higher percentage means more educated women or less gender discrimination. We know that a comparatively higher percentage of women managers in Pakistan is because of 'women only' institutions. In the contexts where management jobs are open to men and women, women are in extremely low numbers, and the situation is not very different in other countries.
KEYWORDS: female under-representation, female participation, sex-roles, management, Pakistan.

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