Comment by Riaz Haq on August 13, 2012 at 10:05pm

Here's an excerpt of an article in Saudi Gazette on Pakistan's higher education:

...Salam is part of a Pakistani tradition of immense talent and educational excellence. On February 2, 1995, Arfa Karim a nine-year-old girl from a small village in Pakistan became a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), the youngest in the world, and was invited by Bill Gates to visit Microsoft Headquarters in the US. Today, Pakistan has the 7th largest pool of scientists in the world. It is the 9th largest English-speaking nation in the world. It is the world’s 9th leading nation in telecom usage and 15th in internet usage.

Lately, the Government of Pakistan has made concerted efforts to raise the quality of higher education infrastructure in the country to international standards. Today, we have the satisfaction of having several world class educational institutions. According to the Quality Standard World University Rankings 2010, there were two Pakistani universities among top 200 Technology Universities of the World. In addition, six Pakistani universities are among the top Asian universities according to the 2012 QS Rankings. These are National University of Science and Technology (108), Karachi University (191), Aga Khan University (201), Lahore University of Management Sciences (251) and Lahore University (251).

Over the past decade, two major revolutions have taken place in Pakistan - one in the Information and Communication Technology and the other in Higher Education. Tele-density in Pakistan has increased to 69 percent. The mobile phone market has grown 22-fold and internet users have grown 138-fold. These revolutions have transformed the knowledge landscape in Pakistan and made knowledge creation, assimilation and dissemination exponentially better. This has gone a long way in providing greater impetus to the progress being made in the higher education sector of the country. Today, Pakistan has 146 universities registered with the Higher Education Commission alone. Apart from these, there are many private universities developed by various bodies and societies. University enrollment in Pakistan tripled from 276,274 in the year 2002 to 803,507. Today, Pakistan produces more than 10,000 computer science graduates every year.

The government of Pakistan has invested heavily in higher education sector. This can be gauged from the fact that some 4,874 PhD scholarships have been awarded for studies domestically. In addition, about 5,000 PhD scholarships have been awarded for study in the best universities in the world. With joint funding from the Higher Education Commission and the USAID, the world’s largest Fulbright Scholarship program (worth $150 million) is also successfully functioning in Pakistan.

A substantial part of quality education pertains to easy access to sufficient quality and quantity of books, research papers and journals. To achieve this objective, the Higher Education Commission has established its own Digital Library in Pakistan which can compete with the best academic libraries in the world. The Digital Library enables every student in every public sector university across the length and breadth of Pakistan to access 45,000 textbooks research monographs from 220 international publishers as well as 25,000 international research journals free of cost. This has enabled the universities in Pakistan to function in a truly cutting edge fashion.

The provision of such state of the art facilities has resulted in the flowering of a research culture in the academic institutions in Pakistan. As a result, the publication of research papers has expanded manifold in the last few years in Pakistani universities. According to one survey, 4,300 research papers were published by Pakistani scholars in 2008 alone. Needless to say, the trend has grown since then....

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&con...

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 19, 2012 at 1:58pm

Pakistanis believe in the value of hard work, reports Express Tribune:

No matter what the prophets of doom say in nightly news shows on TV day in day out, an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis still believes that hard work is duly rewarded in the country and leads to material success, according to a recent poll by Pew Research Center — a nonpartisan “fact tank” in Washington DC.

In fact, of all the 21 countries where the survey was conducted, Pakistan came on top with 81% of respondents saying people succeed if they work hard as opposed to 15% who believe hard work is no guarantee of success.

The United States followed Pakistan with 77% of respondents saying hard work assured success. India, China and Japan were more sceptical with only 67%, 45% and 40% of the respondents recognising a close link between hard work and success, respectively.

“Fundamentally, the survey reveals that Pakistanis haven’t lost faith in the country. The Pakistani youth believes that current problems are short-term and can be resolved,” said Asad Umar, who joined politics in April after resigning from Engro Corporation, Pakistan’s largest conglomerate, as its CEO. “That’s why Pakistanis believe in hard work — and its direct relationship with material success – more than the people of the United States, Germany or Japan.”

The survey was conducted between March 28 and April 13 in all provinces face-to-face with 1,206 people of the age of 18 years or more.

While a majority of Pakistanis tend to have faith in the existing economic system to reward them with success if they work hard, less than half of Pakistanis approve of the free-market economy, reveals the survey. About 48% of the respondents think people are better off in a free-market economy, down from 65% three years ago.

“I’m not surprised that the percentage of people having faith in the free-market economy has dropped significantly in recent years. We don’t have a free-market economy. The sham system that’s in place is actually reflective of a rent-seeking economy, where self-interest is pursued shamelessly at the highest level of the government,” Umar said.

Talking to The Express Tribune, first-generation entrepreneur Shakir Husain, who is involved in several national and international ventures, said most Pakistanis don’t even understand the basics of the free-market economy.

“I’ve found that even educated Pakistanis are least versed in economics and the working of the free market. TV channels have added to the problem, where they tend to politicise structural issues that confuses people further,” he said.

The Pew survey also revealed that about 76% Pakistanis think that the economy will either worsen or stay the same in the next 12 months. The corresponding figures for India and China are 49% and 11%, respectively.

When asked if their standard of living is better than the standard of living of their parents when they were of their age said they are worse off.

Among those who think the economy is doing poorly, roughly one-third of the respondents in Pakistan held the United States responsible for bad economic conditions. Another one-third said that people are themselves to be blamed for the bad economy. On the other hand, almost two-thirds of the respondents in India blamed themselves for the bad economy.

“It’s easier for the average Pakistani to simply blame the entire ‘system’ without understanding the root of the problem. Also, our politicians and bureaucrats are not honest about their own shortcomings. Hence, the blame is put on ridiculous things,” Husain said.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/415086/pakistanis-more-optimistic-than-...

http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/07/12/chapter-4-the-casualties-faith-...

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 4, 2012 at 5:17pm

Here's a Dawn newspaper Op Ed by S. Akbar Zaidi, a Pakistani political economist, about economic myths in Pakistan:

...absence of scholarly engagement results in numerous myths about Pakistan’s economy which become part of the general conversation, and then of conventional wisdom. One can list any number of such misperceptions, but perhaps a handful will emphasise the point.

It is not the fast-moving consumer goods, the Engros and the Habib Banks, or Pepsi or Unilever or ICI, which drive Pakistan’s industry, as so many of the elite who work for them falsely believe. Instead, Pakistan’s industrial force and its economy are based on the dynamic and creative small-scale or informal sector.

Research at LUMS has shown that this sector constitutes as much as 90 per cent of economic establishments, 30 per cent of GDP and 25 per cent of export earnings, and employs 78 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force of Pakistan.

These 3.3 million small- and medium-sized establishments are highly labour-intensive in comparison with the large-scale manufacturing sector, and around 95 per cent employ less than five workers. The backbone of Pakistan’s economy is its informal, small-scale sector, for which policy is seldom designed.

A second myth repeated ad nauseam is that Pakistan is predominantly rural and is an ‘agricultural country’. Research by Reza Ali showed as long ago as 1998 when the last census was held, that Pakistan was almost half urban and half rural, using more productive and useful definitions of ‘urban’, and not the moribund definitions proposed by the Census Organisation.

Fifteen years later, although research awaits the next census, it is not possible to call Pakistan a ‘rural’ country by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, probably 60 or 70 per cent of the people in Pakistan reside in areas one should call urban.

Furthermore, with integrated communication services and linkages, the idea of a ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ divide is increasingly redundant, and one ought to consider settlements and habitation on a continuum.

Since Pakistan is primarily urban, it is also no longer agricultural in terms of the contribution to the economy to which agriculture contributes only one-fifth. However, agriculture is still the main form of employment for Pakistani labour — around 45 per cent of the workforce.

Nevertheless, in areas which are designated by the government as ‘rural’, the non-agricultural sector generates nearly 60 per cent of the total income. Hence, even in ‘rural’ areas, economic activity other than agriculture provides a greater share of income than does agricultural activity.

One might just add in passing that Pakistan — its economy, its agriculture and its relations of production — is not feudal, no matter how often one repeats the claim that it is. At least on this one count, many social scientists are grudgingly coming around, although since many Western journalists only meet such ‘feudals’, they still write mainly about ‘feudal’ Pakistan.

Many liberal members of the Pakistani elite argue for a reduction in the military budget, believing that this will lead to a resultant rise in social-sector spending. One look at the data will show that both have fallen over the last decade.

Yet another particularly pervasive and persistent myth amongst Pakistan’s elite is that US aid to Pakistan is ‘good for the country’, when academic research has shown consistently that nothing could be farther from the truth.

There are numerous other such false hopes which Pakistan’s elite invests in, some of which are translated into government policy. Nevertheless, perception matters perhaps more than reality. If people believe something, they act on the basis of that false knowledge and understanding. Many explanations as to why Pakistan is in such dire straits rest at the doorstep of
Pakistan’s literate, though highly uneducated, elite.

http://dawn.com/2012/09/03/economic-myths-our-elite/

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 8, 2012 at 10:37am

Here's BMI's Q3/2012 report on rising food consumption in Pakistan:

Our near-term domestic demand outlook for Pakistan is looking brighter than before. Declining costs of credit and disinflationary pressures should prove supportive of domestic demand. However, we acknowledge a near-term risk to our domestic demand outlook, which is the impact of deteriorating macroeconomic conditions on remittance inflows. Should a slowdown in global demand weigh on remittance growth, this could dampen domestic consumption in the near term. Longer term, the business environment challenges of a destabilising insurgency, chronic lack of electricity generation capacity and an unskilled labour force will continue to hold back the consumer sector from realising its full potential. We therefore expect the liberalisation of the Pakistani consumer sector to occur at a glacial pace going forward.

Headline Industry Data

2012 food consumption growth = +12.1%, compound annual growth rate (CAGR) forecast to 2016 = +9.3%

2012 alcoholic drinks value sales growth = +19.0%, CAGR forecast to 2016 = +10.4%

2012 soft drinks value sales growth = +15.2%, CAGR forecast to 2016 = +8.8%

2012 mass grocery retail sales growth = +20.9%, CAGR forecast to 2016 = +12.2% Key Company Trends Pakistan A Fledgling But Growing Force On Global Halal Scene: Pakistan has not been able to gain much from its US$2trn halal brand market, and has a small share in the global halal industry. The country’s exports have improved from zero-level during the past two years; however, it is still insignificant. However, with the Pakistani government now putting its weight behind the development of the domestic halal industry, there is certainly a cause for optimism in the sector’s future prospects.

The Sindh Board of Investment has entered an agreement with the Halal Department of Malaysia to provide training of certification to its staff. The government also announced that it will be engaging in a project to ensure the credibility of the country’s halal certifications in a bid to tap into the global halal market, which is valued at over US$1trn.

BMI Bullish Coca-Cola’s Prospects In Pakistan: US soft drinks giant The Coca-Cola Company is planning to invest another US$280mn by 2013 in Pakistan. According to Coca-Cola, it plans to channel the bulk of its capital expenditures towards increasing the production of its existing brands as well as expanding its overall beverages portfolio. Coca-Cola plans to introduce more juices and mineral water in the Pakistani market over the coming years. This strategy could diversify Coca- Cola’s presence beyond the carbonates sector and help it secure early footholds in the higher-value bottled water and fruit juice segments, which boast tremendous long-term promise.

http://www.marketresearch.com/Business-Monitor-International-v304/P...

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 18, 2012 at 11:57am

Here are some interesting recommendations made by a working group of leading Pakistani development professionals and outside experts at the Global Economic Symposium (GES) and detailed by Seth Kaplan in his blog:

Recommended projects given a $100 million budget

1) Think tank
/Independent
Monitoring
Organization

$10m

Endow two
existing
or new
institutions

Instead of just funding
projects, invest $5m to
endow two institutions
so they will have
independence and
capacity to build for
the long term

Recommend focus on
one think tank for the
energy sector and one
IMO focused on tracking
and evaluating the
quality of public services
(latter higher priority)

2) Education

$60m

Create an
education
innovation
fund

Experiment with new
management models,
curriculum, teacher
programs, incentives,
etc.; scale up those
that work

Strengthen
grade
11-14
colleges

These are for 17-20 year
olds before university;
aid going to technical/
vocational schools now,
but none going to this
sector; these youth
susceptible to extremism

3) Judiciary

$30m

Expand
arbitration
courts
to new cities

Now just in Karachi
and Lahore only
(IFC funded)

Strengthen
judiciary
training
institutions

Expand coverage of
these to lower
level officials

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2012/09/05/can-foreign-aid-improve-p...

http://www.global-economic-symposium.org/symposium-2012/press-relea...

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 26, 2012 at 4:37pm

Couple of stories from Daily Times:

1. Mobile Phones:

KARACHI: Pakistan is a land of opportunities and the credit for this goes to the huge youth population and the rich pool of talent available in the country. These sentiments were expressed by All India Management Association Senior Vice President and Nokia IMEA VP D Shiva Kumar during his recent visit to Pakistan. He was one of the key speakers from India at the two-day management conference between the two countries in Lahore.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\09\27\story_27-9-2012_pg10_5

2. Agri:

ISLAMABAD: Sixty-four specialists from the ministries of agriculture from Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, Gilgit Baltistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Sindh, and Balochistan have completed a 10-day course on modern farm business and irrigation methods sponsored by the US. The participants will help farmers increase their profits by approaching farming as a business: farmers will be able to identify higher-value crops and access new markets and customers. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) organised this training session to help increase profits through better product quality and water management.

At the completion of the training course in Islamabad, USAID Country Director Jonathan Conly said, “By using modern techniques, Pakistani farmers can capture new customers and increase their profits. The United States is committed to helping Pakistan modernise its agriculture sector so that farmers can improve their livelihoods.” After the workshop, an agricultural specialist from AJK Amina Rafi added “Farming in mountain areas has always been a challenge. I am glad that this training has provided me with skills to help farmers in AJK improve their businesses.”

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\09\27\story_27-9-2012_pg5_4

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 7, 2012 at 4:34pm

Here's a Financial Times Op Ed on Pakistan:

Pity the people of Pakistan, trapped between self-serving, complacent elites who preside over a crumbling state, and a rich array of violent extremists who seem determined to tear the same state apart....

The military, the country’s most meritocratic and efficient institution, is widely regarded as the only force that can break this grim cycle. Yet there are other, largely hidden forces at work in Pakistan that hold it together and offer it a better future:

adaptability and resilience, entrepreneurship and shared coping.

These forces can be found in the very new – widespread mobile banking services – and the very old – Islam’s traditions of charity, justice and learning. When government and donors work creatively with these forces, amazing things can happen.

Pakistan has one of the best regulatory environments in the world for microfinance and one of the fastest-growing microfinance sectors, with 3m borrowers. It is also one of the most innovative places in the world for mobile banking services, partly due to the State Bank of Pakistan’s moves to encourage the market. About 1.5m customers make about 30m transactions a quarter through their mobiles, using a network of 20,000 agents, mainly local shops, to collect their cash.

A wave of charitable giving by individuals has helped to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by floods in 2010 are not still living in tents. A guerrilla army of more than 100,000 Lady Health Workers, funded by government, has helped to reduce markedly the number of women and babies who die in child birth, according to studies by the World Bank.

Too many children are still out of school and many government schools are woeful. Yet Pakistani parents go to enormous lengths to give their children, girls and boys, a chance at an education.

Low-cost private sector schools, charging perhaps $2 a week, are booming in slums and villages. Wherever girls receive a secondary level education, small private schools run in the homes of their owners start popping up, as they put their education to use to improve their standing in society. Even the government’s conservative figures suggest that a third of children in Pakistan and half in Karachi, many of them from poor households, attend such schools.

Indeed, Pakistan has a record in picking up new approaches to learning. The Allama Iqbal university in Islamabad, the first open university outside the UK, is the second largest in the world with 1.8m students. Start-ups such as Tele Taleem, tucked away on a dusty industrial estate on the outskirts of Islamabad, are pioneering ways to take learning to schools in the remoter regions, through satellite links and cheap tablet computers.

Donors are playing a vital role in promoting social innovation. The UK’s Department for International Development has pioneered a new road map for school improvement in Punjab, which Sir Michael Barber, the education reform expert, says is delivering one of the world’s fastest improvements in school performance. In Karachi, tens of thousands of poorer families will next year receive vouchers to send their children to low-cost private schools.

In agriculture, social venture capitalists such as Indus Basin Holdings are leading efforts to link groups of small-scale rice farmers to multinational companies.

Pakistan’s institutions may seem frozen, its elites worried that taking on the extremists will provoke even more violence in the run-up to next year’s elections. Yet, at the grassroots, Pakistan is in perpetual motion, with ceaseless creativity as people find affordable solutions to their basic needs. These largely hidden forces of resilience offer the best hope for the country’s future. In Pakistan, the state may be fragile but society is far stronger than many think.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/986153d4-2804-11e2-afd2-00144feabdc0...

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 10, 2012 at 5:31pm

Here's a Daily Times story on Pakistan's Malala Day celebration marking the launch of Waseela-e-Taleem program for children's education:

ISLAMABAD: United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown on Saturday said Pakistan could achieve more progress during next three years than any other country as the whole nation has consensus for promoting education as basic right of every child.

“This is a breakthrough moment for Pakistan’s five million out-of-school children as result of Malala’s courage,” Brown said addressing a news conference after his two-day visit to Pakistan that also coincided with Malala Day observed worldwide. He believed that the silent majority is speaking and that there is now national consensus that the country can delay no longer in ensuring girls and boys have schools to go and teachers to teach them.”

“Country after country is adopting Malala as their symbol for a girls’ right to school,” Brown commented. Brown who also telephoned Malala’s two friends Kainat and Shazia, both injured in attack, said not only in Asia but Malala Day was being observed from Latin America and Europe to Africa and several cities in the United States. “Today, we can say with certainty that as long as there are girls out of school anywhere in the world, Malala will be their beacon of hope. Visiting Pakistan and everywhere I go, the message I have received is the same: we are all with Malala,” Brown said.

Brown also praised Pakistan’s creation of four new Malala schools, a Malala Centre for women’s studies and a Malala postgraduate institute. He also expressed pleasure over the plan to provide financial support to poor families for sending their children to schools.

Mentioning to his telephonic interaction with Malala’s friends, he said both were courageous young women and wanted to become doctors. During his meetings with ministers of education from every province, he said everyone expressed their commitment to delivering educational opportunities for girls and boys.

Particularly, he said all of them have emphasised that they would work ceaselessly to ensure that three million girls who are denied schooling are no longer discriminated against anywhere in the country,” he said.

Brown also quoted that education minister is committed to expand community schools including 900 in the Swat Valley and FATA that provide route into the schooling for children who have never gone to school.

He also referred to a plan launched by Benazir Income Support Programme to expand a conditional cash transfer to families choosing to send their children to school what he said aims to enrol three million children into school over the next four years.

“So action is already underway this week to move further and faster to meeting the Millennium Development Goal for education,” he commented, adding that one million people have now signed worldwide petitions.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\11\11\story_11-11-2012_pg7_12

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 25, 2012 at 11:18am

Here's an excerpt from a piece in The Atlantic Cities on economic mobility in US and comparing it with Pakistan:

A 2007 study by the organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development combined a number of previous estimates and found income heritability to be greater in the United States than in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and France. The United Kingdom, which had been far less mobile than the United States during the late nineteenth century, brought up the rear, but this time it was just a bit less mobile than the United States. Thanks to a 2012 recalculation by Miles Corak, an economist at the University of Ottawa, we can now add Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan to the list of societies that are more mobile than the United States.

http://m.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/05/what-matter...

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/100516/inequality-mobi...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 30, 2019 at 8:38pm

Intergenerational Mobility in Pakistan Higher Than in India

Source: World Bank

https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3688539744?prof...

https://st1.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3688570908?profile=...

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28428

Comment