Asian mega-deals on October 21, 2020Asia is open for business, and will soon be home to the world’s largest trade bloc, carrying with it more than a third of the world’s population and GDP. Rightly called the ‘mega-deal’ the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or RCEP consists of countries from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc and Australia, China, […]
The irrelevant economy on September 16, 2020Money begets money, so it is said, and the financial market is proof of the fact that skill, luck, serendipity, and piles of cash will make you ever bigger piles of cash. The mercurial Bazaar of Barter trades in various financial instruments, and even at its most somnolent, is volatile and reactive to the tiniest […]
The Golden Shackle on September 11, 2020The Muslim world’s contribution to world GDP is only about 5%, which goes down to 3% without the inclusion of oil and gas. With one quarter of the world’s population, our share of the total global amount spent on Research and Development is less than 2.5%; of the 597 Nobel Prizes awarded to date, 12 […]
Geoeconomics – ‘a Terrible Remedy’ on August 8, 2020Words change and ideas evolve as the definition of power shifts, and the garb of the power broker is transformed. We partition our present into the pre and post-Cold War era- a defining period that ushered in changes the impact of which still lingers. The West won, capitalism was awarded the sash and tiara, and […]
Gadani’s star — rising? on July 23, 2020The sinking of the Pakistani merchant ship SS Al-Abbas on the 16th of August, 1971 by the Mukti Bahini was momentous not least because it’s salvage and scrapping heralded the rise of Chittagong as a major competitor for Pakistan in the ship breaking arena. Gadani in Pakistan, Chittagong in Bangladesh and India’s Alang-Sosiya are the […]
Conflict of Interest on June 28, 2020The world moves, haltingly perhaps, towards greater transparency yet Pakistan scuttles ever quicker towards blessed opacity. The profit-motive, reviled by some, is still grudgingly accepted as the engine that drives our markets and encourages the innovation that fuels economic growth. But the appropriation of the profit-motive by government, a hallmark of the developing world, has […]
The Economy is Not a Monolith on June 10, 2020The pressure is on for economists the world over. Globalisation has brought umpteen benefits to countries and peoples across the world but has also bound us together in a net of inter-dependency and collective consequences. The novel Coronavirus took down country after country in record time and the metronomic regularity and the economic implosions that […]
Wildfire and dandelion decisions on May 31, 2020Akin to the landslide method of rupee devaluation rather than a slower downward adjustment, the government’s “wildfire” strategy of infection spread in place of a well-controlled and monitored spread has its roots not in the logic and methodical proof of science but rather in the impatience and populism of politics. Our strategy against the unchecked […]