Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion Pakistan’s officially recorded IT and IT-enabled services exports stand at approximately $3 billion annually as of the mid-2020s. The number is frequently cited by government ministers and trade promotion officials as evidence of Pakistan’s digital economy emergence —…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion Pakistan’s construction sector has experienced a remarkable period of visible activity over the past decade. Cranes punctuate the skylines of Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad. Housing scheme advertisements fill prime-time television slots. Real estate investment channels absorb a disproportionate…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion There is no economic problem in Pakistan that is simultaneously so large, so visible, so well-documented, and so consistently inadequately addressed as the housing deficit. Approximately 10 million housing units — conservative estimates reach this figure, while more…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion Pakistan has been negotiating energy infrastructure deals with its neighbours for longer than most of its senior technocrats have been in their careers. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline — TAPI — has been under discussion, negotiation, memorandum, and framework…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion Pakistan receives between 1,900 and 2,200 kilowatt-hours of solar irradiance per square metre annually across most of its territory — among the highest solar resource endowments of any major populated country on earth. Balochistan’s solar irradiance levels are…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion Pakistan’s power sector circular debt is not a financial problem with a financial solution. It is a political problem with political causes, sustained by political choices, and solvable only through political courage that every government since 2008 has,…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion Pakistan’s pharmaceutical industry is one of the country’s best-kept economic secrets — and not in a flattering way. It is a sector with genuine industrial depth, a trained scientific workforce, and a domestic market of 220 million people.…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion In 2005, Pakistan’s textile exports and Bangladesh’s textile exports were roughly comparable — both nations were in the $6–8 billion range, competing for the same markets with broadly similar product categories. By 2023, Bangladesh’s garment and textile exports…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion The dominant economic narrative of our era is reshoring, near-shoring, and industrial reinvestment. The United States has passed the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild domestic manufacturing. Germany is…
Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion In the 1950s, Pakistan had approximately 5,200 cubic metres of fresh water available per person per year. Today, that figure stands at approximately 1,000 cubic metres — dangerously close to the internationally recognised water scarcity threshold of 1,000…