Business

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is unlikely to fully benefit from $4.5bn financing package it secured about two and years ago from International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation (ITFC) owing to market limitations of the Jeddah-based agency. Pakistan and the ITFC on Monday signed about $400 million worth of two facilities to finance oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports by December this year. …

STOCKHOLM: US economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson won the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for work on commercial auctions, including for goods and services difficult to sell in traditional ways such as radio frequencies, the Nobel Committee said. The duo was honoured “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats,” the jury said. The Royal Swedish …

Having provided liberal fiscal and monetary stimulus, policymakers are looking forward to an economic recovery driven mainly by the manufacturing sector and the construction industry. However, stimulus alone will not be enough. In the case of manufacturing, the growth has to be synchronised with an increase in agricultural output and the establishment of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) related Special …

Pakistan is always in the quest of interest and exchange rate stability — the two prerequisites for sound economic growth. Structural issues of the real economy and of the external sector make it difficult to maintain interest and exchange rate stability for even a few years. That keeps economic growth unsteady with all its socio-political consequences. The PML-N government had …

The loan programme of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suspended in January remains in limbo as Pakistan’s public debt went past 87 per cent of GDP at the end of 2019-20, up from about 72pc of GDP at the end of 2017-18. Pakistan direly needs the IMF support to maintain healthy foreign inflows from bilateral and multilateral lenders to keep …

ISLAMABAD: The Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on Money Laundering has retained Pakistan on its “Enhanced Follow-Up” list for a meagre progress on technical recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to fight money laundering and terror financing. The first Follow-Up Report (FUR) on Mutual Evaluation of Pakistan released by APG — a regional affiliate of the Paris-based FATF — showed Pakistan improving …

KARACHI: A day after news reports appeared about a new SRO issued by the government regarding rules about access to foreign currency accounts, the State Bank of Pakistan said in a circular that nothing has changed. “There has been no change in the general or special permissions given by the State Bank to individuals under the foreign exchange regulations,” said the circular …

ISLAMABAD: As opposition parties gear up to launch their anti-government campaign from the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) platform with price hike as one of its key agenda items, Prime Minister Imran Khan on Saturday vowed to use all available resources of the state to bring down food prices in the country. Admitting that there is a price-hike in the country, the prime …

Over the last decade, the meaning of brand maintenance has drastically changed. Where it was once about making sure your organisation isn’t coming off in a bad light on print or even TV, most of the conversations in this age revolve around social media, which can be really hard to track down. That’s exactly what a Pakistani startup hopes to …

OIL majors are on a job cutting spree. When seen through the prism of the cuts announced in recent weeks, the overall crude scenario appears bleak and gloomy. IHS Markit has reported a capital spending drop of 50 per cent by several US oil and gas companies this year, while internationally the drop has been around 30pc. This has contributed …