Today is the 6th anniversary of the death of Pakistan Peoples Party leader and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. She was assassinated on December 27, 2007 after addressing an election rally at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi.  It is believed that her assassination was ordered by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani wing of the Taliban called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Mehsud was later…

Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea  experienced a dramatic rise under authoritarian regimes from 1960s through 1990s. The dictators who led these states also showed the way to…

IT projects ranging from automated meter reading and computerized land records management to online education and mobile banking are now at various stages of implementation across Pakistan.  In a report released today, the World Bank calls these projects "unprecedented in the public sector in developing countries". The objective of these efforts is to…

Drone is now a household word in Pakistan. It outrages many Pakistanis when used by Americans to hunt militants and launch missiles in FATA. At the same time, it inspires a young generation of students to study artificial intelligence at 60 engineering colleges and universities in Pakistan. It has given rise to robotics competitions at engineering universities like…

Pakistani rupee has sharply declined to 109.50 rupees to a US dollar, a loss of nearly 10% of its value in just a few months since Mr. Nawaz Sharif was sworn in as Prime Minister in June, 2013. At the same time, the foreign exchange reserves have plunged to $3.463 billion, a 12-year low since November 2001 when country had foreign reserves of $3.5…

I was a little child growing up in Karachi when the news of JFK's assassination was received with great shock and extreme sorrow in Pakistan. That was 50 years ago today. Just a couple years earlier in 1961, Pakistan's President Mohammad Ayub Khan had  made a successful state visit to the United States. He was warmly received at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington DC by US President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy. …

A 2005 study by US General Accounting Office (GAO) found that Indian government's figures for software and technology exports to the United States were 20 times higher than the US figures for import of the same from India.



U.S. General Accounting Office looked at the 2003 data showing the United States reported $420 million in unaffiliated imports of BPT (business, professional, and technical) services from India, while India…

Livestock revolution enabled Pakistan to significantly raise agriculture productivity and rural incomes in 1980s. Economic activity in dairy, meat and poultry sectors now accounts for just over 50% of the nation's total agricultural output. The result is that per capita value added to agriculture in Pakistan is almost twice as much as that in …

Suhail Rizvi's 15.6% stake in Twitter was worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday when the social media company went public on the New York Stock Exchange.…

The new Ms. Marvel’s real name is Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old Muslim Pakistani-American girl from Jersey City, New Jersey. “Kamala has all of her opportunities in front her and she is loaded with potential, but her parents’ high expectations come with tons of pressure,” says Marvel's press release. “When Kamala suddenly gets…

Book rental companies like Silicon Valley based Chegg, founded by Pakistani-American Osman Rashid and Indian-American Aayush Phumbhra, are helping American college students deal with rising textbook costs. Their business is inspired by Netflix movie rental business. Other major contenders in this space are Bookrenter,…

Malala Yousufzai has inspired about 200,000 children, including 75,000 girls, to enroll in primary schools in Pakistan's Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (KP) province, according to the provincial education minister.



Yousafzai's story "is certainly helping us to promote education in the…

With a net worth of $3.8 billion, Shahid Khan tops the Forbes list of the richest Americans of South Asian origin. Overall, Khan ranks 122nd on Forbes 400 list for 2013, up from 179th in 2012.



Born in Pakistani city of Lahore, 63 year old Shahid Khan is a mechanical engineer and a self-made billionaire who built his fortune as a top supplier of bumpers to the auto industry. Khan made history in 2011 by becoming the…

Pakistan is known to have significant natural gas deposits trapped in the form of methane hydrates in sedimentary rocks off the coast of Baluchistan. Tragic as yesterday's earthquake is in terms of loss of human life, it may also have triggered the release of substantial…

NASDAQ IPO of Silicon Valley's cyber security firm Fire-eye has made its Pakistani-American founder Ashar Aziz worth $430 million at the market close on Friday, according an estimate by Forbes magazine.

FDI is up and load-shedding is down during Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government's first 100 days. However, there has been little progress on resolving fundamental issues such as lack of security, growing budget deficits, high current account deficits and continuing heavy subsidies to the power sector and various public sector enterprises like Pakistan Steel Mills, PIA, Railways, etc.



Foreign Inflows Jump: 



Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's first 100 days in…

"My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big…

Some argue that the Two Nation Theory died with the 1971 partition of Pakistan that led to the separation of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Others say that the TNT (Two Nation Theory) was dead the day Pakistan's founder Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah passed away on Sept 11, 1948.…

Talks offer by Prime Minister Sharif has caused a significant rift in the  Pakistani Taliban leadership.  While Punjabi Taliban's leader Asmatullah Muawiya has welcomed the offer, leaders of the Pashtun Taliban have rejected it. The split has become more serious with the Pashtun Taliban's decision to remove Muawiya from his position as the leader of the Punjabi Taliban.…

Plummeting Indian rupee is the most obvious symptom of the world losing confidence in India. The crisis of confidence is so great that Jim O'Neill, former Goldman Sachs executive whose BRIC acronym made India an attractive investor destination in 2001,  has recently said that “if I were to change it, I would just leave the "C"" in BRIC.…