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IMF and the US
Established alongside the World Bank at the end of World War II in 1944, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assumed an important role in trying to foster economic stability and global growth. Even...
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Labour exploitation in global retail chains
Labour unions within the developed world complain of jobs being exported overseas by companies trying to maximise their profits by lowering wage-related costs of production. On the other hand,...
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Of carrots and kashkols
Besides Saudi Arabia, the US and the UK are the largest and most persistent providers of bilateral aid to Pakistan. The fact that this foreign aid is used as a means to exert strategic leverage within...
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Busting the myth of top-down growth
Developing countries around the world have been nudged by entities like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for decades to encourage economic growth to overcome deprivation....
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Dangers of ‘benchmarking the business of agriculture’
The latest World Bank attempt to begin ranking countries on the basis of their ability to offer business opportunities within the agricultural sector has raised serious concerns regarding food...
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Lopsided approach to fighting corruption
A new Transparency International (TI) report titled Fighting corruption in South Asia: Building accountability has termed South Asia the world’s worst region in terms of corruption, based on its...
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Modern-day slavery
We live in a world of organisational hierarchies, where fruits of labour are obviously not distributed evenly. A corporate lawyer can make more in a day writing up a legal brief than the annual salary...
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Hurdles for women’s participation in politics
Accusations of rigging continue to be a source of worry for the current government, despite it having been in power for a year. While the last election process may have unfairly denied a few prominent...
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To have and to have not
Our latest federal budget has been criticised for not doing much to address the glaring inequalities which plague our country. The problem of addressing the gap between the rich and the poor is,...
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Fault lines in our educational system
The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in April 2010 committing Pakistan to provide free and compulsory education to all children below the age of 16 was a time of hope for educationalists. It...
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Multiple faces of human trafficking
The US State Department has released its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report concerning the global phenomenon of human trafficking and the resulting conditions of forced labour, which are...
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Global war and peace
The Global Peace Index (GPI) has just been released by the international think-tank, the Institute of Economics and Peace, and it claims to be the world’s leading measure concerning the issue of...
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Time to reassess maternal health efforts
Improving maternal health was one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) identified back in 1990 in order to provide a common blueprint for the leaders of all countries and major development...
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Responding to international humanitarian crises
The international humanitarian system comprises a wide range of organisations, including UN agencies, the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, non-governmental organisations, multilateral and...
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Lagging prospects of human development
The Human Development Report (HDR) for 2014 has just been released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), illustrating in vivid detail, the lacklustre progress in ensuring the provision...
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School enrolment is not enough
For the past decade, both donor agencies and governments of developing countries have been trying to increase school enrolments in the effort to improve the dismal state of education. According to the...
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How and why the MDGs remain elusive
Much of the developing world, including our own country, remains caught up in a seemingly endless cycle of political instability, internal strife, and growing external debt. Despite spurts of economic...
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Time for the ‘trickle-up’ approach?
For decades those in positions of power, within rich and poor countries alike, have ascribed to reliance on those already well-off in the effort to create more wealth, in the belief that this wealth...
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The politics of food security
Failure to reach consensus on the WTO’s trade facilitation agreement is threatening to undermine the very rationale of the global trade body, and a potential return to bilateral and regional trade...
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Give cash to the poor?
Every year, rich countries provide billions of dollars in aid with the goal of trying to improve the lives of the world’s poor. This aid is channelled through different development projects...
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