News

Karachi’s tax dilemma

Our municipal institutions are revenue-starved. Be it the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC), towns or the union committees, the problem is the same. To consolidate finances, the KMC has been pursuing the imposition of municipal utility charges and taxes (MUCT) for some time now. The decision to collect Municipal Utility Charges and Taxes (MUCT) in Karachi is yet to take any concrete shape.

Murky politics in a fragile economy

In the development decade of the 1960s, the issue of trade and not aid cropped up because much of the industrialisation was debt-driven and business leaders started talking about increasing domestic savings, investment, production and exports. But over time, the trade gap mostly continued to widen. Tight monetary policy to depress domestic demand and ease external sector pressures resulted in d

State-owned entities lost Rs1.4 trillion in two fiscal years

The nation’s state-run commercial entities incurred losses amounting to a staggering Rs1.395 trillion over the fiscal years 2021 and 2022, the latest consolidated report by the Ministry of Finance has revealed. This figure is more than twice the size of the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP), bringing to light significant concerns regarding financial management and operational efficienc

Board of Privatisation Commission discusses divestment of PIACL

The Board of Privatisation Commission will take up the Scheme of Arrangement and the transaction structure of Pakistan International Airlines Corporation Ltd (PIACL) on Tuesday. The transaction structure has been proposed by the financial advisers for the divestment of the national flag carrier. The financial advisors presented a proposal for the legal segregation of the PIACL aimed at the sepa

Global cooperation on the decline since 2020, laments World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum (WEF) launched on Monday the Global Cooperation Barometer to measure the state of global cooperation. The barometer indicates that global cooperation was resilient in multiple dimensions from 2012 until 2020 but overall cooperation declined by 2 per cent from 2020 to 2022. The Global Cooperation Baro­meter, developed in collaboration with McKinsey and Company, uses 42 i