Suchergebnisse

Pakistan for many years maintained strict controls on foreign
direct investment. However, over the past decade controls on foreign
investment in manufacturing have diminished sharply, though less so for
the service sector. The government continues to impose restrictions on
foreign trade, which adversely affect foreign direct investors in
several ways. Nonetheless, Pakistan has moved a substantial distance
toward liberalising direct foreign investment. There are two obvious
policy issues related to foreign investment raised by these
developments. First, should Pakistan proceed further toward
liberalisation and at what pace? Second, with a liberalised investment
sector, should Pakistan become an active protagonist among developing
countries for a multilateral agreement on investment?

The Paper, "Shadow Pricing and Macroeconomic Analysis: Some
illustrations from Pakistan ,,1 by Lyn Squire, I. M. D. little and M.
Durdag (henceforth simply SLD) is an important contribution for two
reasons. Firstly, it represents the first major step by the World Bank
to provide a comprehensive set of shadow prices for Pakistan using a,
methodology [7] that while not as yet officially adopted by the Bank
seems likely to have a pervasive influence on all future attempts to
define and estimate shadow prices in the Bank's economic work. The
Bank's methodology is a lineal descendant of the famous Project
Appraisal and Planning for the Developing Countries by I. M. D. Little
and J. Mirrlees [6]. Thus, in the SLD paper, two of the leading
"shapers" of shadow price technology take Pakistan as one of the first
test cases for the practical application of their theories.

The effects of free trade policies on the welfare of the country in the light of the continued growth of multinational corporations as viewed by organized labor are examined. The labor unions argue that the operations of multinational corporations undermine all previous notions about the gains from trade & that new restrictions on the imports of commodities & the export of capital & technological knowledge are urgently needed. Hence, 2 different ways in which multinational corporations can give rise to new valid arguments for trade restrictions are examined: a careful examination of the attributes which set them apart from previous forms of business organization, in particular their ease in transnational coordination of production & marketing decisions across national boundaries; an examination of multinational corporations as catalysts in the rapid alteration of existing patterns of trade & investment with the burden of the adjustment in the composition of domestic production which must be borne by labor. It was concluded that though multinational corporations do pose problems for government, labor unions & other groups, labor can provide its own solutions (stronger ties between the national unions of different countries, experiments with new institutional forms of international collective bargaining) & the appropriate response of governments is to enforce existing laws. Agreement is expressed with some of the accusations of labor & other groups against these corporations in that they do indeed pose the problem of enormous power yet further removed from the individual. They thus aggravate the individual's sense of powerlessness. It behooves the corporations to change the image. E. Loomis.

The role of relative prices in determining the export
performance of developing countries is now well established. Studies by
Kravis [2], Mo-Geehan [3] and others have found that price
competitiveness is essential for maintaining a rapid rate of export
growth in both developed and developing countries. For Pakistan, Husain
[1] has shown that changes in export prices resulting from changes in
the export bonus scheme had a significant effect on raising the level of
munufactured exports over the 1960-1967 period.

Research on developing countries over the past two decades has
produced" an impressive body of evidence suggesting that there are
important similarities in the process of development among all
countries. Cultural, political and social factors make their imprint on
the development of individual countries, but the^ work of Kuznets,
Chenery and others shows rather convincingly that key econom¬ic
variables in the economy—the shares of industry, saving and government
revenue in national income, for example—move in fairly predictable ways^
during the process of growth. Chenery has shown through regression
analysis that just two economic variables—per capita income and foreign
capital inflow —and one demographic variable—population size—are
sufficient to explain a very high proportion of the differences in these
structural characteristics among developing countries. (See Chenery
[2]).

A new look at Pakistan's informal sector. Data on the informal sector, compiled from censuses & sample surveys in one major city (Rawalpindi), suggest that both real wages & employment have grown in the informal sector. The seeming paradox of real wage growth in a labor surplus economy is explained by its growth in both agriculture & large-scale manufacturing, both of which were made possible by Pakistan's growth performance during the 1960s. After adjusting for age & education, the differences in wages between the formal & informal sector are quite small, a reflection of high labor mobility between the two sectors. 9 Tables. HA.