Suchergebnisse

The mayor of Bogota, Gustavo Petro, recently hit the headlines
with his incisive comment, "A developed country is not a place where the
poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation." This
quip defines how policymakers around the world should look at the issue
of urban transport, or rather sustainable urban transport. Rapid
economic growth in the postwar period and high urbanisation combined
with a greater need for mobility have escalated problems of congestion,
noise and air pollution, and road accidents, necessitating a focus on
the sustainability of urban transport. Pakistan finds itself at the
crossroads where it has to balance the increasing demand for mobility
with environmental concerns. This book by Muhammad Irfan is an opportune
contribution.

Deforestation remains one of the most intractable
environmental problems of today. About one third the size of the
original forest cover has disappeared so far. Despite continuous efforts
by the world community to curb this process, deforestation continues
unabated in most parts of the world, with serious consequences for the
human livelihoods, eco systems, and global climate. Pakistan also faces
serious problem of depletion of its forest reserves. Approximately 39000
ha of forest are being cleared every year.1 If deforestation continues
at this pace, it is feared that Pakistan will lose most of its forest
within the next thirty to forty years. Being a forest poor country, with
forest occupying less than 5 percent of total land area,2 protection of
its forest resources is a vital task. Forest management faces many
challenges in Pakistan. Forests face tremendous pressure, not only from
a population of 160 million people for meeting their needs3 (be it only
subsistence needs), but also from market forces which have seen soaring
timber prices for many years now. Forest department is ill equipped to
counter these challenges. It lacks human and financial resources, and
relevant technical expertise.

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The relationship between export expansion and economic growth
has been examined extensively during the last two decades in the context
of the suitability of the alternative development strategies. The decade
of the 1970s witnessed an emerging consensus in favour of export
promotion as development strategy. Such a consensus was based on the
following facts. First, higher export earnings working through
alleviating foreign exchange constraints may enhance the ability of a
developing country to import more industrial raw materials and capital
goods, which, in turn, may expand its productive capacity. Secondly, the
competition in export markets abroad may lead to the exploitation of
economies of scale, greater capacity utilisation, efficient resource
allocation, and an acceleration of technical progress in production.
Thirdly, given the theoretical arguments mentioned above, the observed
strong correlation between exports and economic growth was interpreted
as empirical evidence in favour of export promotion as a development
strategy. The empirical evidence in favour of export promotion rests on
the general approach where real growth is regressed on contemporaneous
real export, growth and the significance of the export growth
coefficient supports the proposition that export growth causes output
growth. Balassa (1978); Feder (1982); Fosu (1990); Kavoussi (1984);
Tyler (1981) and Ram (1985) have followed such an approach.1 Khan and
Saqib (1993), on the other hand, examined the relationship between
exports and economic growth by constructing a simultaneous equation
model comprising equations for exports and economic growth. They found a
strong association between export performance and GDP growth for
Pakistan, and that more than 90 percent of the contribution of exports
on economic growth was indirect in nature.

National savings are critically important to help maintain a
higher level of investment which is a key determinant of economic
growth. Although savings rates have fallen in many developing countries
during the last two decades, Pakistan presents a unique picture of
experiencing high rates of economic growth along with very low savings
rates. In fact, the national savings rate of Pakistan is not only low
compared to that in many countries with per capita income about the same
as Pakistan's but it is even lower to that in some South Asian countries
with lower per capita income. Pakistan's economic performance during the
last three decades has been impressive. Real gross national product
(GNP) has grown at an average rate of 6.0 percent per annum since 1960.
The national savings rate, on the other hand, has fluctuated around an
almost horizontal trend (15 percent) during the same period. Thus,
Pakistan's saving performance and its overall economic performance
appear to be incongruous. Although the low savings rates have become a
major source of concern in recent years, not much attention has been
devoted to highlight the key determinants of saving in Pakistan. In
recent years, few studies have been done on this issue using both the
time-series and cross-section data. Qureshi (1981); Abbot and DeRosa
(1984) and Khan (1988) using time-series data have examined various
determinants of household/national savings. Qureshi (1981) concentrated
on economic determinants and found income and its rate of growth, the
rate of return on financial assets and rate of inflation as key factors
influencing household savings in Pakistan.