February 13, 2005
IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WON'T COME:
Can Pakistan persevere? (Andy Mukherjee, February 11, 2005, Bloomberg News)
The World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, is heaping lavish praise on Pakistan's economic advances. "The progress has been terrific," Wolfensohn said in the capital, Islamabad, this week. "Seven percent growth by a country which was hovering around 3 percent a few years back is quite an achievement." [...]The skeptics are being unfair to Shaukat Aziz, who has been - first as Musharraf's finance minister and then as prime minister since August - the architect of a modernization program that will pull Pakistan out of poverty if given some more time. [...]
[W]hat really brought Pakistan out of intensive care and into the recovery room was a set of tough-minded domestic policies that had nothing to do with Sept. 11.
By reducing import tariffs to an average 10 percent - a third of their 1991 levels - Aziz started up the export engine in time for Pakistani-made textile and apparel to benefit from the new quota-free regime in global textile trade.
Or take the privatization program, which was a nonstarter in the 1990s amid allegations of corruption that surrounded a system of staggered payments by buyers of government assets. State-owned companies are now sold transparently through open bidding, and buyers pay up front. The government uses asset sales proceeds mostly to repay debt.
As much as 80 percent of the banking system's assets have slipped out of oppressive government control that brings with it the malaise of state-directed lending and asset misallocation. [...]
Pakistan's economy did well when Ayub Khan was dictator in the 1960s, and then again under Zia ul-Haq between 1977 and 1988. Since higher growth of those periods did not last, why should it now? Growth may be sustained this time because the painful changes Aziz has pushed through in the last five years are going to be irreversible - under any political dispensation. [...]
Investors like the certainty that dictators offer; they also like the protection of property rights that comes with strong democratic institutions. What they don't like are fledgling democracies minus institutions, especially if they are also struggling economically.
And that's what Pakistan was in the 1990s. Wolfensohn is right. The challenge now is to "stay the course" and build institutions that would bring investments and jobs - even when Musharraf steps down as army chief.
Developing a serious economy will do more to get rid of their fundamentalim problem than any military operation. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 13, 2005 6:15 AM
The gradual development of new species is not evident from the fossil record which creates problems for the original theory. Doctrinaire naturalists, if they wish to maintain their scientific standing, need to deal with it, like Dr. Gould tried to do by positing a theory which acknowledged the problems with Darwin's conclusions and by extension maybe his original assumptions.
Those assumptions, as evident from his most vociferous supporters, were a justification for a purely materialistic view regarding the origins of the physical universe and the nature of man. Writing the possibility of God out of the equation was and still is the purpose. Ad hominem attacks regarding motives and competence is a charateristic of the committed ideoligist not the scientist. The creation of fruadulant evidence in support of a theory is common among cultists and should raise a flag of warning for anyone who wishes approach the truth. The theories of Darwin, Freud and Marx may or may not be correct but their underlying assumptions are obvious and their structures render them beyond any final proof. The theories say more about the belivers than the essence of the things they try to describe.