Shahrukh Wani

In 1975, NYC narrowly averted bankruptcy. In Shakespeare’s London, life expectancy was six years lower than the rest of the country. An 1842 report by Edwin Chadwick noted that a labourer in rural Rutland expected to live over twice as long as a labourer in the city of Liverpool. These cities built infrastructure backed by […]

The story is now as Pakistani as it gets. We go to the IMF, get a few billion dollars, we use it to finance an import-led growth bubble which increases domestic consumption. It’s all good so far. We say goodbye to the IMF. Consumption allows us to proclaim that we’re growing. The GDP is growing, […]

Increasing taxation is possibly the most fundamental challenge Pakistan faces today, not only to adequately finance public investment and services, but also to establish a fairer society.

To fix the economy, focus on the political discourse

I just completed Joe Studwell’s new book “How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region.” Here are some thoughts I tweeted about after reading it. 1) Size of farms matters! Studwell argues that having a small (3ish acre) family-owned farms boosts agriculture productivity (read: land reforms!). There are various loopholes countries (like […]

This is an archived version of an article written for Dawn.com, published on Aug, 28th 2018. If you want to share it, please do so the version on Dawn.com.  Pakistan has a new leader at the helm who, if his first address to the nation is to be considered at face value, is set to make a radical […]

We need to improve the quality of schools, build infrastructure, and hire more teachers. We need all of this but, at the end of the day, we also need something broader.

Markets are good for a lot of things. They have an irrefutable ability to cater to our demands, how seemingly ridiculous our demands might be. Think about silly putty. If enough people want it, they will get it. But there is a catch. You must be able to afford it. You can desire as much […]

The article was published by The Guardian. With more than 20 million children out of school, Pakistan has, at last, begun talking about its education crises. Our media and civil society routinely grill politicians on a lack of funding for public schools. Opinion sections of national newspapers usually publish a few articles a week on how […]