Karachi shares market significantly outperformed Mumbai in the last ten years. But this fact is not enough to get any positive attention from Fareed Zakaria, India’s best-known cheerleader in the West. As expected, Fareed Zakaria’s discussion of “The Rise of the Rest” sings praises of the BRIC nations, particularly mentioning his native India in the most glowing terms. There is nothing wrong with that, except that Zakaria omits any positive mention of India’s neighbor Pakistan in the context of economic performance in the decade of 1999-2009, and chooses to strike [...]

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Hagler Bailly, a global management consulting firm with an office in Islamabad, warned in a 2006 study that Pakistan is going to witness gas shortage starting in 2007, and the imbalance will grow every year to cripple the economy by 2025, when shortage will be 11,092 MMCFD (Million standard cubic feet per day) against total 13,259 MMCFD production. The Hagler Bailly report added that Pakistan’s gas shortage would get much worse in the next two decades if it did not manage any alternative sources. It appears that we are seeing the beginning of the crisis that HB predicted back in 2006. Recent [...]

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Pakistan’s KSE-100 stock index surged 55% in 2009, a year that also saw the South Asian nation wracked by increased violence and its state institutions described by various media talking heads as being on the verge of collapse. Even more surprising is the whopping 825% increase in KSE-100 from 1999 to 2009, which makes it a significantly better performer than the BRIC nations. BRIC darling China has actually underperformed its peers, rising only 150 percent compared with energy-rich Brazil (520 percent) and Russia (326 percent) or well-regulated India (274 percent), which some investors [...]

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Dr. Ishrat Husain, a former World Bank senior official and an ex governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, wrote an article captioned “India, Pakistan: a comparison” at the end of the first five decades of two nations’ existence as independent states. To my knowledge, Dr. Hussain has not done an update of his article since it was first published. Although about three years too late, this post is my attempt to present a comparison of the two South Asian nations after sixty years of independence. Here is the opening paragraph from Dr. Husain’s article from the late 1990s, which [...]

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This December 31, 2009, is not just the end of the year; it brings a momentous decade of achievements in Pakistan to a chaotic and bloody end. After a relatively peaceful but economically stagnant decade of the 1990s, the year 1999 brought a bloodless coup led by General Pervez Musharraf, ushering in an era of accelerated economic growth that led to more than doubling of the national GDP, and dramatic expansion in Pakistan’s urban middle class. The decade also cast a huge shadow of the US “war on terror” on Pakistan, eventually turning the nation into a frontline state in the [...]

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As Pakistan struggles to bring a sense of stability and security amidst daily carnage, it is important to recognize that there is more to Pakistan than meets the eyes of a casual consumer of the images and reports by the world’s media. For example, Pakistan is a developing country with functional bureaucracy, well-organized police force, democratic institutions and a powerful army. And Pakistan has more advanced infrastructure than its neighbors, including India. Among the modern infrastructure pieces in place in Pakistan are its motorway system, extensive road network, mobile telecommunications [...]

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As the Copenhagen climate change summit gets underway, India is facing the reality of being a major polluter in the world mainly because of extensive use of coal as source of energy for its economy. Pakistan, on other hand, relies more heavily on natural gas for energy and uses very little coal, in spite of having large deposits of it in Sind province. South Asia is among the regions that will be most heavily affected by climate change. At 8 feet below sea level, Pakistan’s financial capital Karachi shows up on the list of world’s mega-cities threatened by global warming. Other South [...]

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At 8 feet below sea level, Pakistan’s financial capital Karachi shows up on the list of world’s mega-cities threatened by global warming. Other South Asian cities likely to come under rising sea water in the next 100 years include Mumbai, Kolkata and Dhaka. However, it’s not just the big cities in South Asia that will feel the brunt of the climate change. The rural folks in India are already seeing rising crop failures, increasing poverty and frequent farmer suicides.Addressing a regional conference in Islamabad earlier this year, Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the Inter-governmental [...]

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I grew up hearing the word jugaad as commonly used in India and Pakistan to describe any unsophisticated, often dangerous, contraption built on the fly to solve a pressing problem to make do in the absence of a better, more elegant solution. Jugaad is how the mechanics in India and Pakistan manage to keep very old and outdated machines running with crudely made parts, long after the original manufacturers have discontinued making them. Now, a few Indian management gurus in the West have a found a way to sell jugaad as a sophisticated management technique to industry and academia.An example of it [...]

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China is beginning to act more like a global superpower by playing an increasingly important role in its South Asian neighborhood, with growing interest in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The United States, as the reigning superpower deeply involved in South Asia, essentially acknowledged China’s stature in the region when the following paragraph found its way into the joint communique issued by President Barak Obama and President Hu Jintao at the end their recent summit in Beijing: “The two sides welcomed all efforts conducive to peace, stability and development in South Asia. They support [...]

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