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Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion In 2021, the State Bank of Pakistan launched Raast — an instant payment system enabling person-to-person transfers, bill payments, and merchant transactions through a central interoperable infrastructure. In the same period, JazzCash and Easypaisa — the two dominant…
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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 —…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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.…
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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…
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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…