World Bank’s ‘magical discovery’

BARELY had the dust settled on the IMF’s insipid report on governance than the World Bank launched, with much fanfare, its latest prescription — this time on fiscal federalism. The bank’s report presents itself as a fresh diagnosis of Pakistan’s malfunctioning intergovernmental system, when actually there is little that is either new or thought-provoking about it. In fact, the report comes across as an overwhelmingly technocratic exercise. It catalogues institutional weaknesses, distils lesso...

By none@none.com (Shahid Kardar)