Growth of Manufacturing Employment in Pakistan: A Comparative Analysis of Punjab and Sindh (Preliminary Results)

Provincial economic disparities in Pakistan are often discussed in political circles. Recently, these disparities have also caught the attention of economic planners. I However, very few professional studies have analysed the issue due to paucity of inter-provincial data. Moreover, the existing studies base their analysis on cross-sectional data obtained from various sources and cannot be used to analyse disparities in economic growth and its sources.2 The purpose of present paper is to provide an initial contribution to the analysis of provincial economic changes in Pakistan. Employment growths in the manufacturing sectors of Punjab and Sindh are analysed for the period 1980-87. Regional differences in employment growth are usually attributed to differences in industrial structure and also to differential impacts of regional-specific influences (infra-structure, policies, political situation, etc.) that determine competitiveness of a region. The present study analyses these two components of growth for Sindh and Punjab in order to explain differential growth in these provinces. Such an analysis is useful for provincial planning as it may help plan for a balanced growth

Economic benefits of studying economics in Canada: a comparison of wages of economics majors with wages in other fields of study, circa 2005

Publisher's version/PDFWe compared the wages of economics degree holders with of those in 49 other fields of study using data from the 2006 Canadian population census. At the undergraduate level, economics majors earned the sixth highest average wage in 2005. When demographic controls were applied, they ranked ninth on the salary scale. When we compared the wages in 15 fields that require students to take math courses, economists ranked in the middle, as they also did when working as managers and professionals. When working as business and finance professionals, economists had wages surpassed only by finance majors. At the graduate level, economics majors had a greater wage advantage over all of the other fields except for business majors. These results are useful for Canadian university economics departments that have been experiencing declining enrolments over the past few years. In addition, we hope they will enable students to make more informed choices regarding their academic discipline. The results also highlight the need to direct greater policy attention towards developing mathematical skills among incoming university students as a prerequisite for them to build analytical skills, the demand for which in the labour market has been demonstrated in some Canadian and US studies