1. Economic journalism under review

Journalism: releases reported, systems left unexplored

The current-account story got the arithmetic right and resisted premature celebration: record remittances still left a $139m deficit because imports rose while exports sat near $30bn. But the reporting kept remittances, exports and imports as three separate facts rather than one sentence: Pakistan is financing weak domestic productivity by exporting labour. Workers abroad are outperforming firms at home — a point that connects directly to Haque and Nayab's graduate unemployment data, which shows the firms aren't absorbing the people who stay. No story made that link. (Business Recorder)

The private-credit story let official interpretation pass as fact: 14.8pc nominal credit growth read as "stronger activity and risk appetite." Unadjusted for inflation, working-capital cycles, and repayments, that number says nothing. Nobody asked what share went to new investment versus rollover of existing operations, or compared it to banks' far larger exposure to government paper — the crowding-out story PIDE work on the "permission economy" has flagged for years: banks lend to the sovereign because it's safer and the state prices private risk out of the market. (The News Pakistan)

The cotton story was the week's best sectoral piece — output collapse (14m to 6.85m bales) tied to import costs and lost exports. But it leaned on OICCI's framing alone, when the real explanation is competing and institutional: seed quality, research failure, provincial extension collapse, sugar-sector incentives crowding out cotton acreage. This is not weather. It's accumulated institutional failure — the same sludge-audit pattern of state capacity misallocated toward protected, low-productivity sectors. (Dawn)

The skills........

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