The Political Economy of US Aid to Pakistan

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. At the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US business interests. Time series regressions for the period from 1980 to 2002 and logistic regressions based on votes for the Pressler and the Brown Amendment confirm the significance of these political economic determinants. While in case of the Pressler Amendment, the direct influence of population groups of Indian and Pakistani origins seems to have played a predominant role, the role of ethnic business lobbies appears to have dominated in the context of the Brown Amendment. Time series analysis also provides some evidence for the impact of US business interests based on FDI and exports, but these effects appear to be comparatively small.Public Choice, ethnic lobbying, foreign aid

The Political Economy of US Aid to Pakistan

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. At the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US business interests. Time series regressions for the period from 1980 to 2002 and logistic regressions based on votes for the Pressler and the Brown Amendment confirm the significance of these political economic determinants. While in case of the Pressler Amendment, the direct influence of population groups of Indian and Pakistani origins seems to have played a predominant role, the role of ethnic business lobbies appears to have dominated in the context of the Brown Amendment. Time series analysis also provides some evidence for the impact of US business interests based on FDI and exports, but these effects appear to be comparatively small.Public Choice, ethnic lobbying, foreign aid, International Development, Political Economy, D70, F35,

Determinants of corruption in developing countries

Corruption is not a new phenomenon; we are living with it since the birth of government's institutions. Corruption has two dimensions; public sector corruption and private sector corruption. The public sector corruption means, misuse of public office for private benefits. For cross country analysis, public sector corruption is mainly focused. In this study, we have analyzed the 41 developing countries to investigate the determinants of corruption. Corruption determinants are sub-divided into economic determinants and non-economic determinants. The economic determinants include economic freedom, globalization, level of education, distribution of income and average level of income. The non-economic determinants list consists on press freedom, democracy and share of population affiliated with particular religion. The empirical findings of the study indicates that; all economic determinants are negatively related to the perceived level of corruption except distribution of income and non-economic determinants are not significantly explaining the variations in the level of corruption. This shows that the socio-political and religious norms are so weak that they can not affect the corruption level in these countries. The contribution of religion in people's practical life is very little, so the cultural values of developing countries are not religion based. Therefore, perceived level of corruption is not affected by the religion. This study concluded that government should focus the economic factors to curb the level of corruption. --

Aid effectiveness in education sector of Pakistan

The main objective of this study is to examine the effectiveness of sector-specific foreign aid given to education sector and aggregate foreign aid on the national educational outcomes of Pakistan, respectively. --

A comparative study on improvement of image compression method using hybrid of DCT and DWT techniques with huffman encoding

Image is an important media used to visualize or represent a message in daily conversation between users device. Nowadays, there are many application that involve image processing such as security system, communication system and medical system where images are processed digitally. Image is mainly known for its large data capacity especially high resolution image. Thus, image compression is important to reduce storage size and achieve specific application goals. In this research, hybrid of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Huffman compression technique is proposed. Stand-alone technique of DCT, DWT and Huffman are execute before hybrid all techniques together. Besides, the performance in determining the quality of image, compression ratio and computing time are carefully observed by evaluating the result of Mean Square Error (MSE), Power Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity (SSIM), compression ratio and time of compression and decompression. It is found that the proposed hybrid technique able to reduce storage size with 3.72:1 compression ratio and short computing time with 5 second. The quality of image is slightly reduce compared to original image which are calculated based on MSE, PSNR and SSIM value with 52.74, 30.92 dB and 0.90, respectively. In conclusion, DWT technique has the ability in compressing image size within short time while DCT and Huffman are able to reduce data loss during compression and maintaining good quality of image. Therefore, DCT, DWT and Huffman method are combined together to support each other in producing good performance

Growth Governance Nexus: A Case of Pakistan

Good governance has gained tremendous importance in the development agenda of developing economies since 1990s but growth literature gives mixed picture about the role of governance and institutional factors in explaining GDP growth. The present study is an attempt to provide empirical evidence on interlinks between governance and GDP growth. ADF and Johansen co-integration tests are applied for econometric testing of the hypothesis by using time series data from 1984 to 2010. All the variables turned out to be significant with ICRG (proxy used for governance) having positive and significant impact on GDP growth of Pakistan. Results of the study have shown that governance plays major role in determining GDP growth pattern of Pakistan. A complete reform of the political, economic system, judiciary, bureaucracy and a free media are recommended to improve governance and to achieve sustained GDP growth in Pakistan consequently

Determinants of Corruption in Developing Countries

Corruption is a limp in the walk of human progress. It is not a new phenomenon; it is as old as the history of mankind itself. The corruption made itself visible when the institution of the government was established. According to Glynn, et al. (1997), “…..no region, and hardly any country, has been immune from corruption”. Like a cancer, it strikes almost all parts of the society and destroys the functioning of vital organs, means cultural, political and economic structure of society Amundsen (1999). All this was proved by the major corruption scandals of France, Italy, Japan, Philippine, South Korea, Mexico, United States etc. These scandals bring the corruption problem on the agenda of major international institutions like International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, Transparency International and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developmen