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Tag: Pakistan

  • Pakistan needs to learn from Bangladesh, says Imran Khan

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    Source: The Financial Express

    Imran Khan, who used to be Pakistan’s prime minister, said that Bangladesh has come a long way from Pakistan and that the country can teach us something.

    “When a country stands up for freedom and its rights, when justice settles in people’s hearts, it doesn’t matter what you do, not even military actions. He said, “Because the seed of justice and freedom is in us.”

    In a live talk that was streamed on YouTube on Friday, Imran Khan, the leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, asked for talks with all state institutions right away to find a way to put Pakistan on the path to growth.

    “Pakistan is on the verge of a disaster because hyperinflation is just around the corner. But the current masters don’t seem to care much because they have hidden the stolen money abroad,” he said from his home in Lahore’s Zaman Park.

    Reuters says that Imran Khan, who says that corruption charges are made up, is in a fight with Pakistan’s powerful military. Throughout Pakistan’s past, the military has either ruled directly or supervised civilian governments.

    Khan was arrested and put in jail on May 9. This led to a lot of protests by his followers and made people worry about the stability of the country, which has nuclear weapons and is going through its worst economic crisis in decades.

    In the end, he was let out on bail.

    In the video speech, Mr. Khan said that his call for dialogue shouldn’t be seen as a sign of weakness. He also said that hurting the people of Pakistan physically and financially was not the answer. “The problems of the country will be solved when state institutions do what they are supposed to do,” he said.

    “Every time I ask for a conversation, the people in power think I’m getting weaker, so they start to do more bad things to PTI leaders and workers in an attempt to destroy the party,” he said. He said that no government could get rid of an idea that had been taught to the young people of the land.

    He also told the people in charge to be careful because if they try to crush the PTI, they could end up destroying the country. “No political party has ever seen its leaders do something so cruel,” he said.

    Mr. Khan said that the country had already turned into a banana republic, which is a poor country with a weak government that lives on money from other countries. He said this because the leaders did not even follow court orders to hold elections.

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  • Bangladesh, a happier nation than Canada, Pakistan, India

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    Source: The Daily Star

    A well-known economist from the United States’ Johns Hopkins University has found that Bangladesh is the happiest country in Asia. It is happier than Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, and even India.

    The professor of applied economics looked at how happy or unhappy people were in 157 countries around the world. He found that Bangladesh is even better than Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Finland, Bahrain, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden.

    Steve H. Hanke used figures on the country’s unemployment rate at the end of the year (multiplied by two), inflation, and bank lending rates, minus the annual percentage change in real gross domestic product per capita, to create the Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI).

    In the most recent report for 2022, Bangladesh was ranked 115th, while India was ranked 103rd, Nepal 63rd, Myanmar 39th, Pakistan 35th, and Sri Lanka 11th.

    The Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI) says that a country is happy the higher it ranks and more miserable the lower it ranks.

    Bangladesh got a score of 20.107 on the misery index, and Hanke said that unemployment is the main reason why the country can’t be the best country in the world.

    India got a score of 22.58, and unemployment is also a big cause of the country’s problems.

    With a score of 414.7, Zimbabwe won the index and became the worst country in the world. The HAMI says that triple-digit inflation is the biggest problem for the Zimbabwean economy.

    Professor Hanke says that Venezuela, which was once thought to be one of the richest countries in the world, is now mostly suffering from hyperinflation and is the second worst place to live in the world.

    Vietnam and China, two major players in the global clothing business, have done much better than Bangladesh.

    Vietnam was ranked 139th with a score of 14.839, while China was 142nd with a score of 13.1.

    Switzerland is the happiest country in the world and has the lowest HAMI score.

    Hanke said, “The Swiss debt brake is one reason for that.” The debt brake has been very effective. Switzerland is not like most countries in that its debt-to-GDP ratio has been going down over the last 20 years.

    The second, third, fourth, and fifth happiest countries in the world are Kuwait, Ireland, Japan, and Malaysia, respectively.

    Hanke said that Arthur Okun, a well-known economist who was head of the Council of Economic Advisers when President Johnson was in office, came up with the idea for the misery index.

    Okun made the first version of the suffering index for the US. Okun’s measure is the same as the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate.

    Robert Barro, a professor at Harvard, later changed Okun’s index. He added the 30-year government bond rate and the output gap for real GDP to the misery index. Barro’s index was a way to measure how bad things got during a president’s time in office.

    Hanke changed Barro’s version of the misery index even more by changing the output gap with the growth rate of real GDP per capita and the 30-year government bond yield with lending rates.

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