Trends in Inequality, Welfare, and Growth in Pakistan, 1963-64 to 2004-05

The present study investigates the trends in inequality, welfare, and growth based on per capita household income/consumption in Pakistan, both its rural and urban areas, from 1963-64 to 2004-05. It employs Gini coefficient to measure inequalities and the Sen welfare index to estimate welfare. Real per capita mean incomes/consumption are worked out to analyse growth. The study finds fluctuating trends in inequality, and rising trends in both welfare and growth. In general, inequality, welfare, and growth remain higher in the urban areas. The study finds income inequality to be more severe as compared to consumption inequality.Income Distribution, welfare, Per Capita Income, Gini Coefficient, Pakistan

Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, Muneer Mahmud, and Mustansar Billah (eds.). Pakistan and Changing Scenario: Regional and Global. Islamabad: Policy Research Institute, 2008. 166 pages. Price not given.

There are major developments taking place around the globe affecting Pakistan and the region. Pakistan is dealing with various social, cultural and security issues on its internal side. On the other hand, the dynamics of globalisation are also having an impact offering both challenges and opportunities. Taking into consideration the need for an expert discussion on such issues facing Pakistan, the Islamabad Policy Research Institute held a seminar on “Pakistan and Changing Scenario: Regional and Global”. This book contains the research presented in this seminar and is divided into six chapters. The first chapter in its first paper on “Education in Pakistan: Historical Perspective” reviews various education policies starting with Quaid-i-Azam’s views on education then discusses financing in education and current data on education. The common factors in all these policies were Islamic values, universal primary education, technical education, quality education and national unity. However there was less success in achieving the goals like the integration of madrassa education with mainstream education, the removal of the class barrier between English and Urdu medium students, bridging the rural-urban areas gap and reaching a hundred percent literacy rate

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Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice

International audienceWe investigate the security of Diffie-Hellman key exchange as used in popular Internet protocols and find it to be less secure than widely believed. First, we present Logjam, a novel flaw in TLS that lets a man-in-the-middle downgrade connections to " export-grade " Diffie-Hellman. To carry out this attack, we implement the number field sieve discrete log algorithm. After a week-long precomputation for a specified 512-bit group, we can compute arbitrary discrete logs in that group in about a minute. We find that 82% of vulnerable servers use a single 512-bit group, allowing us to compromise connections to 7% of Alexa Top Million HTTPS sites. In response, major browsers are being changed to reject short groups. We go on to consider Diffie-Hellman with 768-and 1024-bit groups. A small number of fixed or standardized groups are in use by millions of servers. Performing precomputations for just ten of these groups would allow a passive eavesdropper to decrypt traffic to up to 66% of IPsec VPN servers, 26% of SSH servers, 24% of popular HTTPS sites, or 16% of SMTP servers. In the 1024-bit case, we estimate that such computations are plausible given nation-state resources, and a close reading of published NSA leaks shows that the agency's attacks on VPNs are consistent with having achieved such a break. We conclude that moving to stronger key exchange methods should be a priority for the Internet community

Imperfect forward secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman fails in practice

International audienceWe investigate the security of Diffie-Hellman key exchange as used in popular Internet protocols and find it to be less secure than widely believed. First, we present Logjam, a novel flaw in TLS that lets a man-in-the-middle downgrade connections to "export-grade" Diffie-Hellman. To carry out this attack, we implement the number field sieve discrete logarithm algorithm. After a week-long precomputation for a specified 512-bit group, we can compute arbitrary discrete logarithms in that group in about a minute. We find that 82% of vulnerable servers use a single 512-bit group, and that 8.4% of Alexa Top Million HTTPS sites are vulnerable to the attack. a In response, major browsers have changed to reject short groups. We go on to consider Diffie-Hellman with 768-and 1024-bit groups. We estimate that even in the 1024-bit case, the computations are plausible given nation-state resources. A small number of fixed or standardized groups are used by millions of servers; performing precomputation for a single 1024-bit group would allow passive eavesdropping on 18% of popular HTTPS sites, and a second group would allow decryption of traffic to 66% of IPsec VPNs and 26% of SSH servers. A close reading of published NSA leaks shows that the agency's attacks on VPNs are consistent with having achieved such a break. We conclude that moving to stronger key exchange methods should be a priority for the Internet community

The Economics of Political Donations

American corporate and political elites are connected by the donations that the latter receive from the former. Using a novel dataset, this thesis analyzes these connections as a social network. This analysis uncovers the allocation of such money among legislators and the changing structure of this network, and thus of the changing nature of money in US politics. In particular, beyond the well understood increase in the scale of donations, we document how donation patterns have become more polarized, more concentrated, and more dependent on the corporate connections and allegiances of the individual. We show that the last 35 years has seen a transition in the nature of political giving. A similar transition has taken place in terms of who receives the donations. Money is now much more targeted on a small number of key politicians. Moreover, power, as measured by standard network statistics has become much more concentrated. The distribution of donations becoming extremely skewed, dominated by a few `mega-donors', and giving almost exclusively along party lines. The dissertation then goes on to examine whether such ideological diversity when present in the boardroom affects firm performance. We find that whilst a board with a broader range of political opinions and beliefs is correlated with better performance ceteris paribus, that the causal impact of such an increase in diversity is negative and substantial

When two tribes go to work: Board political diversity and firm performance

A substantial literature has studied how increased diversity in terms of gender, age, education, and race amongst members of firms’ boards affects decisions and performance. This paper studies whether ideological diversity in the boardroom affects firm performance. We find that whilst a board with a broader range of political opinions and beliefs is correlated with better performance ceteris paribus, that the causal impact of such an increase in diversity is negative and substantial. This negative effect is still present when diversity is measured excluding top management, and when diversity is defined in terms of the difference between firms’ management and non-executive directors. In conclusion we consider the implication of these findings given the recent growth in both political polarization and ideological segregation.</p

Fosfomycin Versus Nitrofurantoin Efficacy Against Multi-Drug Resistant Gram Negative Urinary Pathogens.

Background: To compare antimicrobial susceptibility pattern of fosfomycin and nitrofurantoin against multi-drug resistant gram negative uropathogens.Methods: In this descriptive study identification of 200 isolates of gram negative bacteria was done by using standard microbiological techniques and the antimicrobial susceptibility was carried out by employing Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion technique. The susceptibility pattern of isolates was then recorded in frequency and percentages.Results: Out of total 200 urinary samples, 97 were multi-drug resistant (MDR) and 103 were non multi-drug resistant gram negative bacteria. Both MDR and non MDR Escherichia coli(E. coli) followed by Klebsiella pneumoniae(K. pneumoniae) were more commonly isolated uropathogens. MDR E. coli was more susceptible to fosfomycin (98%) as compared to nitrofurantoin (81%). Similarly, for MDR K. pneumoniae, same results of better susceptibility of fosfomycin as compared to nitrofurantoin were observed. Maximum resistance was observed in 4 to 5 drugs in MDR E.coli and K. pneumonia and the most predominant resistant pattern was observed in ampicillin and cephalosporins .Conclusion: Fosfomycin holds much better in vitro efficacy as compared to nitrofurantoin against MDR E. coli, K. pneumoniae and P. stuartii