Caretaker Minister for IT and Telecom Dr Umar Saif on Tuesday launched the first-ever Pakistan Start-up Fund (PSF) worth Rs2 billion to attract venture investments and position local start-ups as significant players on the global stage. Ignite National Technology Fund will take charge as the executing body of the PSF and ensure transparency through an independent steering body overseeing the op
The stock market started trading on a bullish note on the first day of the week but the growing political uncertainty and its likely fallouts triggered selling by some worried investors as a result the benchmark KSE 100-share index closed in the red. Topline Securities Ltd said the equities floated in both directions. Initially, the index made an intraday high of 555 points to 65,069 level. How
ALL eyes are on the general elections, now just a month away. But what will happen after the election will be far more consequential to the country’s future. Formidable challenges await the next government. The governing ability of the election winner will be constrained by the complex dynamics of a volatile domestic environment. This is characterised by persisting polarisation, the most seriou
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.
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