| A report has recently been issued from Islamabad title “Privatsation and Economic Policy (June 1992). It deserves serious appraisal for two reasons – because it explains the rationale underlying the current economic policy of the Government and because it has been compiled by one of the main exponents of that policy, the Secretary General Finance himself, whose name appears unusually for a Government release on the title page of the publication itself. |
| Out of its forty-six pages, the first nineteen pages are primarily reiterative, describing the machinery, the methods and the procedure for privatisation. They indicate also the various legal and fiscal measures the government has adopted to protect the interests of all the parties to the privatisation process – the Government, as the outgoing manager/owner against a reversal by any future government, the new owners (whether from the private sector or from employee buy-out groups), and the employees themselves of the disinvested units. The conclusions drawn from the privatisation process and its implications for our national economic policy are discussed over thirteen pages, followed by fourteen pages of supporting annexures. [EXTRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 18 June 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
|
