Expenditure on education is very often justified on the grounds that it is the means of providing equality of opportunity. Actually, at least two related factors prevent each child from getting an equal chance to flourish academically. Firstly, in a dual system of education, elite private...

We argue that Pakistan is unlikely to change its human development ranking and bring it closer to its ranking in per-capita GDP until it copes with it's low achievement in basic schooling. This paper draws on the experience of private sector and NGO schools to identify lessons for the government...

This paper has three objectives. First, to contribute to the literature by carefully documenting home based work in four sectors in Pakistan in a value chain context. Second, to demonstrate the extent to which home-based workers are deprived of the value they create by tracking the distribution...

This paper compiles micro-level evidence to demonstrate the existence of win-win scenarios from environmental mitigation in the trade and environmental context. This implies that environmental mitigation via Clean Production (CP) contribute to net private and social gains in production and trade...

Using the Kuznets inverted-U-shaped association as a structural constraint, we model the social tradeoff between changing inequality and changing income. If observed outcomes for recent decades are taken as constrained political-economic optima, this model identifies the parameters of a social...

This paper has a two-fold objective: first, to examine the terms on which Pakistan receives aid and whether its debt situation is sustainable, and second, to examine the impact of aid and debt on economic growth. It is found that there is little encouraging that can be said about how the terms...

The main objective of this paper was to explore if trade liberalisation has ushered in the large scale de-industrialisation that is feared by some to follow in its wake and whether it has been successful in enhancing export promotion. We relied on several different kinds of evidence to...

Two aspects of the problem of the unemployed educated persons are discussed in this essay. Firstly, the magnitude and incidence of the unemployment of such persons are examined. One point that becomes apparent from looking at the secondary data is that the bulk of the educated unemployed persons...