Akbar Noman

Columbia University | CU · School of International and Public Affairs

Funding needs pertaining to infrastructure and climate change are huge for developing nations. But there are also vast amounts of monies in assorted forms of savings, including notably, sovereign wealth funds. In this important piece, the author comprehensively documents the problem, describes the potential resources, and, most important, presents...

Africa's development exeperience and its controversies; the case for industrial policies and an overview of the volume.

The revival of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is all the more welcome for having followed one of the worst economic disasters—a quarter century of economic malaise for most of the region—since the industrial revolution. Six of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the first decade of this century were African. Yet only in Ethiopia and Rwa...

After being among the earliest countries to embark on the East Asian path, Pakistan fell away but was still among the ten fastest growing economies of the world during 1960–90. However, the seeds for the subsequent economic and technological malaise were also sown in that period. This paper provides an overview of recent theoretical and empirical w...

Adam Smith explicitly assumed the existence of a class of capitalists. He spoke of a “previous accumulation” of wealth in the economy into the nature and causes of whose wealth he was inquiring. This “previous accumulation” predated and preconditioned his analysis: “the accumulation of [capital] stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to t...

This chapter lays out the premise for the rest of the volume which addresses the central question of what needs to be done to sustain and accelerate the recent improvement in the economic performance of Sub-Saharan Africa. This revival remains too dependent on booming commodity prices whilst sustained, poverty-reducing growth requires structural tr...

Why has the economic growth performance of Sub-Saharan Africa overall been so disappointing over the past fifty years? More importantly, what can be done to sustain and improve upon the accelerated growth experienced in recent years? What are the possibilities and policies for Africa to achieve sustained, rapid economic growth, poverty reduction, a...

Pakistan was widely hailed as a "model" of economic, especially industrial, development during the 1960s-see, for example, Papanek (1967). At the same time, the experience of Pakistan has been an important part of the basis of the seminal critiques of import-substituting industrialization by Little, Scitovsky and Scott (LSS) in (1970) and by Balass...

The economic relations between Pakistan and the socialist countries are examined against their political background. The sharp deterioration in Pakistan's political relations with the socialist countries in the 1950s was accompanied by a contraction in trade, which had almost been a one-way flow until the early 1960s, consisting of Pakistan's expor...