Durre Nayab

Tariq Riaz. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Poverty of Nations: With Special Reference to Pakistan . England: Research Publication. 2017. 392 pages. U.K. £ 7.70 (Paperback).

Looking into the institutional functioning and economic management of the country, the book investigates the causes of Pakistan’s poverty and also suggests ways to achieve sustainable prosperity. Following the prologue, the book is organised in five parts. The first part traces the human evolution and the quest for economic and social progress, and the relation between individuals, state, and economic development through history. Part two talks about some basic concepts linked to economic development and human welfare. These include: gross national product and productive capabilities; stages of transformation of an economy; and what history tells us about how the poor became rich. Part three presents the author’s views on the Washington Consensus policies and how it led to the domination of the neoliberal economics, and its role in creating a poverty trap. A comparison of four Asian countries and their pathways to economic development, or lack of it, is presented in part four of the book. Looking at the economic development history of South Korea, China and India, Riaz explains how and why Pakistan lags behind all these countries. The last part of the book focuses on normative economics, and recommends policies, which if implemented, can help build Pakistan’s economy and transform it into an efficient and vibrant welfare state. This book can be of interest specifically to policy-makers and academicians, but it can be a good read for anyone interested in understanding persistent poverty in Pakistan and measures needed to get out of it.

Self-reported symptoms of reproductive tract infections: the question of accuracy and meaning.

Verbal surveys are the most common way of gauging any population s health status, but questions remain regarding the accuracy of the responses they elicit. The present paper compares women s self-reports regarding their experiences with reproductive tract infections (RTIs) and the medical diagnosis that they went through to ascertain the presence or otherwise of the infections. Weak concordance was found between women s self-reports and the medical diagnosis, with the former over-representing the presence of infections. Some of the selfreported symptoms were pathogenic in nature, as represented by the true positive reports, but the majority of the self-reports were false positives when compared to medical diagnosis. The conventional health surveys, relying solely on verbal responses, thus, do not essentially represent the actual health situation of a population studied, and any policy intervention formulated exclusively on this information would be flawed. There is a need to understand the non-medical context of illnesses to understand the disease fully.

Renew Cities to be the Engine of Growth

PIDE Cities Research Programme was initiated in Karachi with a conference titled Cities: the Engine of Growth on November 15-16, 2006. The conference was held in our largest city and was well-attended by economists, architects, town planners, Nazims, government officials, NGOs, journalists, and other citizens. The discussion was animated and about twenty-five speakers addressed the gathering. All points of view were represented and debated.