Has Aid Helped in Pakistan?

This paper has a two-fold objective: first, to examine the terms on which Pakistan receives aid and whether its debt situation is sustainable, and second, to examine the impact of aid and debt on economic growth. It is found that there is little encouraging that can be said about how the terms on which Pakistan has received aid over time have changed, and its current debt situation is not sustainable. Also reported is the analysis done elsewhere which shows that aid has a negative (Granger) causal impact on GDP, and aid has a robust negative impact on economic growth after controlling for supplyside shocks. We provide various reasons for this negative association.

Structural Adjustment, Industrialisation, and Export Promotion

The main objective of this paper was to explore if trade liberalisation has ushered in the large scale de-industrialisation that is feared by some to follow in its wake and whether it has been successful in enhancing export promotion. We relied on several different kinds of evidence to demonstrate that de-industrialisation has not coincided with the intensive structural adjustment period while export growth has. However, both industrialisation and export promotion in Pakistan have been below potential, below the mean for low income countries and have not even kept pace with progress in this regard in the low income country group. We were not able to establish, possibly due to the paucity of time-series observations, that either industry or exports generated positive externalities for or used resources more productively than the rest of the economy.

Muhammad Nejatullah Siddiqui. Issues in Islamic Banking: Selected Papers, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation. 1983 , I 52pp.Author and Subject Indexes.

The book under review is a compilation of the author's articles and lectures that highlight the prominent developments in the literature on the subject of Islamic banking and inform the reader of the current state of debate on it. One of the earliest and main contributors to this topic is the author himself. The focus of this review will mainly be on "Economics of Profit-Sharing", which is the title of the fourth chapter of the book and is among his latest contributions. This chapter is a significant contribution as it is the first attempt to formalise the concept of profit sharing into an analytical model and, therefore, demands closer scrutiny. However, in the remaining chapters of the book, the author has drawn attention to some of the fine points made in the literature on this topic. Since some of these points appear to be controversial to me, I will briefly discuss them before moving on to the analytical chapter of the book

Has Aid Helped in Pakistan?

This paper has a two-fold objective: first, to examine the terms on which Pakistan receives aid and whether its debt situation is sustainable, and second, to examine the impact of aid and debt on economic growth. It is found that there is little encouraging that can be said about how the terms on which Pakistan has received aid over time have changed, and its current debt situation is not sustainable. Also reported is the analysis done elsewhere which shows that aid has a negative (Granger) causal impact on GDP, and aid has a robust negative impact on economic growth after controlling for supplyside shocks. We provide various reasons for this negative association

The income redistribution impact of financing higher education in Pakistan

This study examines the income redistributional consequences of the public financing of higher education in Pakistan. The results show that the tax incidence and the subsidy to higher education entail a redistribution from the middle and upper to the lower income groups. Earlier studies of other less-developed countries indicated a redistribution from the lower to the upper income groups

Structural Adjustment, Industrialisation, and Export Promotion

The main objective of this paper was to explore if trade liberalisation has ushered in the large scale de-industrialisation that is feared by some to follow in its wake and whether it has been successful in enhancing export promotion. We relied on several different kinds of evidence to demonstrate that de-industrialisation has not coincided with the intensive structural adjustment period while export growth has. However, both industrialisation and export promotion in Pakistan have been below potential, below the mean for low income countries and have not even kept pace with progress in this regard in the low income country group. We were not able to establish, possibly due to the paucity of time-series observations, that either industry or exports generated positive externalities for or used resources more productively than the rest of the economy

Disaggregating rates of return to education

Education is effectively used as a discontinuous variable in studies estimating the rates of return by level of education. We find that the normal procedure used for estimating the rate of return to broad aggregates such as secondary and high understates the returns to these levels and subsequently suggest a procedure for rectifying this bias. We also find, as expected, that broad aggregations that ignore sub-levels of education result in a loss of important insights about the interaction of education and the labor market

Twiddlers syndrome presenting as life threatening electrical storm

A 75-year-old man underwent implantation of a single chamber implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) for primary prevention of his underlying severe non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy. Thirteen months later, he presented to the emergency room(ER) with inappropriate ICD shocks as a result of over sensing of the right ventricular lead and double counting of the right atrial signals. The chest X-ray (CXR) revealed a right ventricular ICD lead displaced into the right atrium with coiling in the pocket. The right ventricular shocking coil was noted at the tricuspid annulus. The lead was removed from the pocket and was replaced with a new lead. This case represents the classical Twiddler\u27s syndrome in an ICD with potential lethal consequences