economist @the_igc @lseecon, lead @igc_zambia. views, mine. anxiety, also mine.
Aug 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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Pakistan increasingly lags behind India and Bangladesh, in five graphs:
1) Pakistan has the lowest per capita GDP growth since 1990: 2) Pakistanis, on average, expect to live less than citizens in India and Bangladesh — a reversal from early 1990:
May 16, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Pakistan's problems are political and have to be solved by better politics. It is absurd to expect technocrats to solve this.
They can support where politics is pro-growth—otherwise, the best you get from technocrats is fancy-looking presentations.
Whenever we have a crisis, this argument comes: give us "experts" and a year to fix it all.
It doesn't work. It never has.
In the 1990s, Moeenuddin Ahmad—a brilliant economist — was appointed as the PM. Mahbub-ul-Haq was the Finance Minister in the 80s. Did it work?
Aug 28, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In 1975, NYC narrowly averted bankruptcy. In Shakespeare's London, life expectancy was six years lower than the rest of the country. An 1842 report by Edwin Chadwick noted that a labourer in rural Rutland expected to live over twice as long as a labourer in the city of Liverpool.
These cities built infrastructure backed by new laws such as the UK's 1848 Public Health Act. NYC built an entire city underneath its city: 438 miles of subway lines, 6,000 miles of sewers, and thousands of miles of gas mains, as this great article notes. newyorker.com/magazine/2003/…
May 12, 2019 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
The story is now as Pakistani as it gets.
We go to the IMF, get a few billion dollars, we use it to finance an import-led growth bubble which increases domestic consumption. It’s all good so far.
May 11, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Over the next weeks, we're going to hear much on the new IMF deal, much, I fear will be either deliberately exaggerated or painstakingly simplified.
We should take this time to discuss the underlying reasons why we end up requiring a bailout every few years.
- IMF hasn't taken over the country.
- All subsidies aren't the same.
- There is a contraction of the economy.
- It was clear that we had to go to the IMF for a while.
- We have gone through this boom-bust before,
- We need to fix our house for ourselves, not IMF's.
Aug 27, 2018 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
1. Imran Khan in his speech in the Senate today said that like a house which has a high debt - it makes sense to decrease government spending and increase revenue.
The revenue part is right, but spending isn't, because governments don't work like households.
Here is why.
2. Governments are not like houses - because the income is exogenous to households, for governments it isn't.
In other words - houses usually get income from outside, so decreasing spending at home wouldn't impact their income.
