An All-Inclusive Rejoinder to All the Chronic Complainers

tahmed #100

Very well said. Very well, indeed. Thank you.
I shall work on it further.

tahmed,

At some level, as an educated person, you have to accept taht acountry that charges income tax based on electricity consumtion has no basis what so ever to prepare any kind of realistic national accounts.

It is al the more pathetic when you say that the finance ministry is headed by a well known pakistani economist. Look, your country is a dogs breakfast. Expose it, do not white wash it.

TAhmed:

Jay is the intellectual capital we have export restrictions on, to prevent our image being sullied.

arjun #110 you write ``intellectual capital being sent back to India ``
I hope for India`s sake that you and jay are not representative of the ``intellectual capital`` being sent back to India.

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CASE OF PAKISTAN,

Pakistan has no basic economic system to bring about any kind of progress. In pakistan it is the electricity company that collects income tax from bussinesses, that is income tax is a percentage of the electricity bill.

There are shops selling imported goods, the exise duty collected is based on the number of shutters the shop has.

With this kind of system, the entire notion of national accounting, the GDP, investments, tax revenue...these are all crap.

What the UN and the WB publish as national account data are what is provided by the countries. The entire country called pakistan is a sham.

rsridhar #107 GNP, and GNP growth rates, is a crude, defective guage at best of progress. This has always been understood by the more clear-eyed economists, and is increasingly more so when significant segments of the population are emigrants whose income is not included in GNP figures. To quote Burki again (who is a fine economist, and an absolute gentleman whom I have had the pleasure of meeting off and on for some years now), emigrant Pakistanis (about 4 million of them a few years ago) are generating as much income as the GNP of Pakistan itself! I doubt if any of this shows up in the GNP of Pakistan, and yet the impact on Pakistan is there for all too see - entire families are supported by earnings from the middle east, for example.
The same is true for India as well, of course. Thus, for the region as a whole, it is external factors that are the engine of growth - not just job opportunities but also the opening up to more positive thinking (at least for some emigrants). Clearly the traditional cultures, values, superstitions-that-pass-for-religion, and so forth of both Pakistan and India have nothing to contribute other than violence, misery and poverty. (I am exaggerating, but unfortunately not too much).

Re: Burki`s article in Dawn
No doubt, Pakistan has saved itself from being a defaulter by agreeing to co-operate with USA. The latter has rewarded Mushy with readjustments in debt and soft loans.
But, unless i missed something, Burki does not say how Pak is going to go on to a higher growth rate. What is going to spur that growth? There is a severe water problem and Pak will have accentuation of the problem in future. Pak, unless one forgets, is (like India) a predominantly agrarian economy.
What else has Pak got? IT. But IT in Pak has failed to take off.
All that Burki`s article in Dawn (pointed out by our chowk general) says is that Pakistan is doing some right things: like getting SBP on right track, privatising some sick units etc. Consider the following from that article:

``The best example of this is perhaps the much celebrated performance of the Indian economy over a fifteen-year period from 1985 to 2000. Readers would recall that for nearly forty years after independence the Indian economy was stuck at what their own economists called the Hindu rate of growth. Once the highly debilitating licence raj began to be dismantled, and the hold of the Indian bureaucracy on the economy began to be loosened, the suppressed growth the country had experienced for so long catapulted the economy towards a considerably higher growth rate.

The same could happen in Pakistan. Like India in 1947-85, Pakistan too has experienced suppression of growth for a decade and a half. Once conditions are put right, we should expect the rate of growth to bounce back. ``
Again, all presumptions! Once Pak puts conditons right, it too can have same growth rate as India . No mention of the booming IT industry in India, the fact that this boom has a lot to do with careful nurturing of some centers of excellences like the IITs, IIS during the period of ``hindu growth``. NO mention of how democracy and liberalisation has unleashed a ``thirst`` for knowledge among the middle class, which is sustaining the IT boom and spilling over into other areas like biotechnology.
If Pak has to duplicate what India is doing, it has to be a sustainable democracy (ensuring continuity of reforms), shed its jehadic aspirations vis-a-vis India and the world and most importantly have trade with India. It makes a lot of sense to catch the elephant`s tail and go where it goes rather than reinvent an elephant!
Sridhar

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Shahid Burki is now bullish on Pakistan (as am I):

One of the most well-recognized Pakistani economists in the world, Rhodes Scholar and ex-VP of World Bank has the following to say:

``For forty years, between 1950 and 1990, Pakistan was transformed from being by far the most backward area of what was once British India into the most prosperous and vibrant part of South Asia. I had then said - in particular in a long lecture I gave in 1997 at the annual conference of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics - that policy missteps by Islamabad in the 1990s had turned Pakistan from a healthy economy to the sick man of South Asia. Had my views changed? Did I continue to be as pessimistic as I was in the late 1990s, or did I see now some reason for hope?

My answer was simple. I had shed my pessimism and I saw considerable reason for hope. This switch in my perception was the result of five developments in Pakistan`s recent economic history each one of which suggested that the country could begin to grow once again - to change the structural rate of growth from the present three to four per cent a year to six to seven per cent a year in the next several years......

One of the most impressive legacies of the Musharraf period is the restoration of health to the financial system. A group of highly dedicated and professional managers has guided public sector commercial banks away from bankruptcy. Privatization has reduced the public sector`s share in the banking sector.

Complete article at http://www.dawn.com/2002/11/26/op.htm

re tahmed32 (# 99):

thanks for not taking my last post personally. i do think that the person at the top of the pyramid can make a difference. i have a detailed response at the ``games generals play`` board.

S,P, Wakil #95 Perhaps the Peter Principle (we can indigenonize this by calling it the Pakistan Principle) could be stated thus for Pakistan: Every incompetent inter-graduate becomes a commissioned army officer, thus making him eligible to transfer his incompetence to every top post in every institution in the country, and to the top post of the country itself.
Would this work??