Results for “pakistan” 203 found
Might the status of India and Pakistan fundamentally change?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the LiveMint version, here is one excerpt:
The status quo between India and Pakistan is temporary. The world should start thinking about a future in which the two nations have a fundamentally different relationship.
Full reunification, of course, is difficult to imagine. But there are many possible options that fall short of that: a loose confederation, a NAFTA-like trade structure, a military alliance, even a broader regional reconfiguration under which each nation loses some territory but the remaining parts move closer together.
And:
What about arguments on the other side? They are mostly longer-term.
First, it’s worth noting that major changes in borders — whether through conquest, secession or unification — are the historical norm. In this respect, the post-colonial era is an anomaly. One view is that this era of relative stability will continue. Another is that it will prove temporary, and frequent border changes will become common once again — just as the border between Russia and Ukraine is being contested again.
If this second view is correct, India and Pakistan are hardly such longstanding, well-defined nations that they are natural candidates to stay exactly as they are. Both their borders and their political arrangements can quickly change.
Just think how unlikely today’s configuration in the Middle East might have seem fifty years ago. We now have Iran as the enemy of Israel and America, a democratic Iraq, a devastated Syria, a wealthy UAE friendly with Israel, a rather passive Egypt at peace with Israel, and Lebanon no longer the jewel of the region, among other major surprises. Get over your recency bias!
I suspect Ethiopians and Eritreans will have a relatively easy time digesting this argument.
Pakistan synthetic control estimate of the day
I find that Pakistan’s per capita GDP would have been an average of about $718 per year higher had the country not undertaken the effort to produce a nuclear weapon. This equates to per capita GDP being 27.8 percent lower on average over the 25-year weapons-development period. Results are robust to several alternative specifications, including country exclusion, sparse synthetic controls, non-outcome characteristics as predictors of GDP, and in-space placebo experiments of differing specifications.
Here is the paper by Anthony Mayberry, via TEKL.
Pakistan fact of the day
No prime minister of Pakistan — a country that has swung between democracy and dictatorship — has ever completed a full term in office.
Here is more from the FT, noting that the current inflation rate exceeds fifteen percent.
That was then, this is now — Pakistan edition
Ayub Khan ended the political turmoil to become the country’s first military ruler in 1958. He revived the economy, carried out agrarian reforms, provided stimulus to the industry and encouraged foreign investment. State-backed capitalism and alliance with the US powered a ‘golden age’ of high growth rates under Ayub Khan’s reign. The growth was significant enough for the international media to take a note of it. In January of 1965, New York Times went on to predict that Pakistan might be on its way towards an economic milestone reached ‘by only one other populous country, the United States’. A year later, The Times, London, called Pakistan’s survival and development ‘one of the most remarkable examples of state and nation-building in the post-war period’. Pakistan was ‘considered to be one of the few countries at the time that would achieve developed-country status’.
That is from Sameer Arshad Khatlani’s recent and really quite good The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan.
The two must-read books on Pakistan
Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country.
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience.
They won’t make my best of the year list, because neither is fresh out, but they are two of the best books I have read this year, Lieven being a reread.
Another difference between Pakistan and India
Observing India tends to make people more libertarian. At least parts of the private sector are quite vibrant, and the heavy hand of government can be seen in many places. Plus you might think “the country is too big in the first place,” so you will be thinking in terms of decentralization, and devolving power to the states and union territories, rather than strengthening the central authority.
Observing Pakistan tends to make people more statist. The private sector has fewer well-known successes. The central authority appears too weak, and problems with insufficient tax revenue are extreme, even for a developing economy. As for federal income tax, there are only about 1.2 million active taxpayers, in a country of over 200 million people. The very pleasant Islamabad aside, urban public goods seem underprovided, even relative to Indian cities.
It is an interesting question which countries at least seem to provide evidence for which sets of political views.
My favorite things Pakistan
1. Female singer: Abida Parveen, here is one early song, the later material is often more commercial. Sufi songs!
2. Qawwali performers: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers, and try this French collection of Qawwali music.
3. Author/novel: Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. I am not sure why this book isn’t better known. It is better than even the average of the better half of the Booker Prize winners. Why doesn’t he write more?
4. Dish: Haleem: “Haleem is made of wheat, barley, meat (usually minced beef or mutton (goat meat or Lamb and mutton) or chicken), lentils and spices, sometimes rice is also used. This dish is slow cooked for seven to eight hours, which results in a paste-like consistency, blending the flavors of spices, meat, barley and wheat.”
5. Movie: I don’t think I have seen a Pakistani film, and my favorite movie set in Pakistan is not so clear. Charlie Wilson’s War bored me, and Zero Dark Thirty is OK. What am I forgetting?
6. Economic reformer: Manmohan Singh.
7. Economist: Atif Mian, born in Nigeria to a Pakistani family.
8. Textiles: Wedding carpets from Sindh?
9. Visual artist: Shahzia Shikhander, images here.
I don’t follow cricket, sorry!
Karachi, Pakistan bleg
Guidebooks on Karachi, at least in English, are rather hard to come by. So what should I see and do, and where should I eat? I thank you all in advice for your usual sage counsel.
Indian and Pakistani stock markets
Right now the Indian market is up a small amount for the week, of course that may change.
I know you all love to yelp that markets don’t predict well (not what markets do!…that word “predict” is loaded) and that stock markets did not predict WWII, etc. The lack of an Indian market reaction here is fully consistent with the fact that prediction is very hard. Investors might simply be unsure which priors to update, and thus prices haven’t changed much. That is consistent with the work of Philip Tetlock, also indicating that prediction is very hard. So this kind of market result does not have to conflict with the best knowledge we have from political science and the other social sciences.
The Pakistan stock exchange, by the way, is down a few percentage points but not seeing massive carnage.
The economy in Pakistan is indeed improving
The recent terror attack in Karachi won’t help any, but still the news is looking up, from The FT:
The IMF has acknowledged that Pakistan averted a balance of payments crisis in 2013 and managed to stabilise its foreign reserves. This week Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, raised the outlook for its B minus rating from stable to positive, while Moody’s last month raised its outlook to stable from negative — albeit for a Caa1 rating, which puts it one notch above Greece.
With liquid foreign reserves having grown almost fourfold in the past year to $12.5bn, a figure equivalent to about three months of imports, Mr Wathra has less cause for concern about the stability of the rupee than some of his predecessors.
The recent plunge in the price of crude has seen the cost of oil imports fall to $9.7bn in the nine months to March, down from just over $11.2bn a year earlier, according to central bank figures.
Falling oil prices have also helped lower the fiscal deficit to an expected 5 per cent of gross domestic product in the year to June, down from above 8 per cent just over two years ago. And the country’s GDP is forecast to grow by about 4 per cent this year, following a similar rise last year.
You may recall my earlier post on Pakistan being an undervalued economy, more here too. It still is.
Pakistan’s burgeoning tech scene
Just two months ago, e-commerce company Markhor, which works with local artisans to produce high-quality men’s leather shoes, became Pakistan’s most successful Kickstarter campaign, raising seven times more than its intended goal, catching the attention of Seth Godin and GOOD Magazine.
There is no greater evidence of this positive change than in Pakistan’s burgeoning technology ecosystem. In a new report released by my company, Invest2Innovate – which was commissioned by the World Bank’s Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) – we mapped the number of startup competitions, incubators, university programs, coworking spaces and forums, and analyzed the gaps and challenges entrepreneurs continue to face in the country.
Three years ago, the ecosystem was relatively nascent, with just a handful of organizations. Today, the space is unrecognizable and brimming with constant energy and activity.
That is from Kalsoom Lakhani, there is more of interest here. Here is my earlier post on Pakistan as an underrated economy.
Is now the time to go long on Pakistan?
Maybe so. Ian Bremmer reports that of 282 elected BJP representatives, not one is a Muslim, even though Muslims are about 15% of India’s population. In some political models, that can make the electorate more willing to cut a deal with Pakistan, as fewer people will fear that the deal will neglect India’s interests. In essence this kind of slanted government can become more Coasean, as it is more trusted by its core supporters.
You will find related mechanisms discussed in my paper with Daniel Sutter, “Why Only Nixon Could Go To China.”
Indeed Modi just invited the Pakistani Prime Minister to his inauguration, an unusual action which is being called “a bold step.”
I have been relatively bullish on Pakistan for some time now. Relative to market prices, that is.
Facts about livestock theft in Punjab, Pakistan
There is yet another paper on this topic, I know you are weary of it, but I remain glued to the screen, so here goes:
Stock theft is an endemic crime particularly affecting deep rural areas of Pakistan. Analysis of a series of cases was conducted to describe features of herds and farmers who have been the victims of cattle and/buffalo theft in various villages of Punjab in Pakistan during the year 2012. A structured interview was administered to a sample of fifty three affected farmers. The following were the important findings: i) incidents of theft were more amongst small scale farmers, ii) the rate of repeat victimization was high, iii) stealing was the most common modus operandi, iv) the majority of animals were adult, having high sale values, v) more cases occurred during nights with crescent moon, vi) only a proportion of victims stated to have the incident reported to the police, vii) many farmers had a history of making compensation agreements with thieves, viii) foot tracking failed in the majority of the cases, ix) all the respondents were willing to invest in radio frequency identification devices and advocated revision of existing laws. The study has implications for policy makers and proposes a relationship between crime science and veterinary medicine.
The link is here, and for the pointer I thank Ben Southwood. This is in fact a significant and understudied topic in development economics, namely small-scale predation in rural settings.
Not surprisingly, that piece appeared in the Berliner und Münchener tierärztliche Wochenschrift.
Pakistan update
1. Militants kill 41 in the Peshawar region.
2. Adulterated cough syrup kills 33, the second such incident in recent times.
3. Pakistan lifts its YouTube ban, but for three minutes only.
Those are the headlines immediately visible today.
Less widely reported is that during 2012, the Pakistani stock index — namely the KSE-100 — is up 48% in local currency and 37% in U.S. dollars.
A Pakistani view on the economics of Obama’s reelection
I am not endorsing this political and economic analysis, merely reporting it:
Many Pakistanis fear President Barack Obama’s re-election will mean a surge in America’s unpopular drone campaign, but for those making and selling US flags to burn at protests this could be good news.
Demonstrations against Washington’s programme of missile strikes against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban militants are common in Pakistan, and no protest is complete without a Stars and Stripes being sent up in flames.
Nadeem Shah, the owner of a flag business in Rawalpindi, the twin city of the capital Islamabad, said he expected more drone strikes — and more protests.
“Of course Obama has become stronger now and he will push his policies harder and there will be more drone strikes because he himself is stronger now,” Shah told AFP.
“When the drone strikes increase the protests against these strikes will also increase in Pakistan and it can have an impact on the flags and poster business.” Pakistan’s flag industry enjoyed a boom in September when a US-made anti-Islam film sparked weeks of demonstrations, almost all lit up with “Old Glory” being burned.
In Rawalpindi, US flags start at around 120 rupees ($1.25) but in Shah’s shop 1,500 rupees will get you a three-square-metre number in cloth.
The article is here, and for the pointer I thank A.H.