A_Gupta wrote:http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/lo ... sk=25714.0
Feb 7 2012
Pakistan: Staff Report for the 2011 Article IV Consultation and Proposal for Post-Program Monitoring.
Leads to a link with a 1.6MB PDF file.
In Table 3a, General Government budget, there are three columns for 2011/12 data, titled Authorities, Staff Baseline and Staff Reform.
In Revenues and grants, the Authorities = 2878, Staff Baseline 2663 (billions of rupees)
This is the 215 billion discrepancy in revenues.
In Expenditure, the Authorities = 3753, Staff Baseline = 4070, this is the 317 billion discrepancy in expenditures.
I can't understand most of the stuff - but almost everything is phrased in familiar words that I have read about Pakistan for years and years. I could understand this, for instance
roughly 3⁄4 of Pakistan’s remittances come from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and the United Kingdom,
Your earlier link speaks of "Loss making PSUs" of Pakistan. The two biggest loss making PSUs seem to be Pakistan Railways and Pakistan Steel.
Pakistan is chugging along despite government. To some extent this could be said of India too with the implication being that small changes in government policy can make huge differences to the economy.
When I read this stuff repeatedly year after year after year it seems to me that I am missing something. There is some kind of disconnect between these policy prescriptions and the ability of "government" in Pakistan to get away with less than the policy prescription. Every year for many years - perhaps more than a decade I find that Pakistan has been doing the same stuff and having the same IMF/World Bank advice delivered to it, but Pakistan simply does not respond or responds with half measures or temporary measures.
What this seems to tell me is that either these prescriptions are not really necessary, or they are prescriptions that are trying to make a "developed country" out of Pakistan. If Pakistan does not follow these prescriptions the consequences are stated as "negatives" - like "poor outlook", "slow growth" etc. There is no bomb or collapse as such. The only "bomb" that I can detect is a demographic bomb of poverty, illiteracy and unemployment.
If I was a scheming Pakistani I would not waste money on development. Having poor people is a blessing. They serve as cannot fodder for jihad. they work for free if they are given something to eat. They can be exported to foreign countries and their meager earnings repatriated home can only help. Zia ul Haq knew the value of Paki human bodies in teh service of anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan. Stuff like "Infant mortality", "illiteracy" etc matter only as long as you seek to actually bring some benefit to a vast mass of people. If that is not your aim, you don't need to do much.
In this connection. I have had some radical/un-PC thoughts - you might have been exposed to some of them. You see, human societies (at least Western societies) have moved from believing in racial inequality to racial equality and in fact absence of "race". Nothing wrong in this per se. Humans are one species genetically.
But if you look at any human society that has evolved over millennia you will find that this human society inevitably has some people who are menial workers, or workers who are unable or unwilling to work beyond a point that is barely necessary to keep themselves alive. There are others who are exceptional in innovation and thinking who rise to leadership in various sphere be it in governance, rats or even crime. A vast mass of people exist between these two "extremes". If you take all these people and measure their intelligence, you will get results that depend on what your intelligence measurement metric is. It you define intelligence as that which makes a doctor, engineer, lawyer, economist and not unskilled laborer, then your results will be skewed one way. If your metric seeks to define intelligence as what is required for the laborer, or "unskilled" task performer your results get skewed another way.
So where is this argument going? It's like this:
If you try and "develop" a society for uniform literacy, intelligence and productivity, you find that you have to address basic concerns like female literacy, birth spacing and nutrition. But this literate, intelligent society of children brought up in this way need to be usefully employed. if you cannot provide them employment that matches their ability you are left with angry educated people. Their skills/intelligence has been honed for engineer level job, but they are not even getting taxi driver job.
One way of avoiding this conundrum is to not interfere with populations. Let them have high death rates and low nutrition. Some will randomly have the intelligence to meet engineer/lawyer standards. Some will remain unskilled, unpaid workers. By playing with society to give every child the opportunity to become super-smart, you are removing the opportunity for people to remain unsmart and serve the unskilled (slave/serf) role in society. I am expressing radical, elitist, even racist concepts but there is nothing original that has not been tried before. Many religions thrive on the "acceptance" of misery and death as God's will and uniform, human powered "development" like birth spacing required for uniform development are contrary to God's will.
Pakistan certainly seems to be headed that way, and I wonder, why not let is continue on that path? A mass of Pakistanis will be good laborers, cheap workers even slaves. Every country should benefit from this human cattle population. But the arms supply benefits only the US. The US is using Pakistani slave labor as soldiers to fight their wars. Those same soldier slaves are useful to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Remove their arms and those underdeveloped massed Pakis will make good
slaves er low wage workers? No?
?}
. Pakistani authorities on Sunday accused Afghan forces of crossing into Balochistan and assassinating two men allegedly providing safe haven to terrorists fighting in Afghanistan.
.