World

One brutally cold evening when I was still in grade school, a trade delegation from China’s northernmost province turned up at our house in a leafy Midwestern American suburb for dinner. My dad, a public servant with the local Department of Development, marched me up to the delegation’s leader, a man with a personal history shaped by revolution and unimaginable struggle, to shake his hand. It felt like it had been carved out of granite. At a time when Japan was the country deemed America’s most daunting commercial rival, just a handful of years after the opening up of China’s economy, this was a glimpse of the Middle Kingdom’s budding global ambition. Everyone’s had far more than a glimpse by now. That ambition has been putti...

Colombo, Sri Lanka – The bullying from a senior health official was bad enough. A sense of betrayal by government authorities during COVID-19 made it worse. But the economic crisis that pummelled Sri Lanka in the wake of the pandemic was the breaking point for Lahiru Prabodha Gamage. The 35-year-old Sri Lankan doctor left Sri Lanka in January 2023 to take up a job in the United Kingdom, after working in a government hospital in the remote town of Hatton, 120km (75 miles) east of the capital Colombo, for six years. He is now a senior house officer for Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). It wasn’t an easy decision. “I really love my country. That will never change,” Gamage told Al Jazeera. “But no matter how much money I earned, I had to pay back huge loans.” And with prices...

It is customary for the Pakistani prime minister to visit China – its all-weather friend and largest bilateral lender – soon after the inauguration ceremony. But Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s five-day visit, from June 4-8, was not about simply following a convention. Pakistan is facing its worst economic crisis in decades. It needs a fresh IMF package; so far it has received 24. Sharif’s delegation included virtually all the key Cabinet ministers, including those for finance, foreign affairs, defence and trade. The delegation also included Army Chief General Asim Munir. This was justified on the grounds that he is a member of the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), a body created to attract foreign investment to Pakistan. More than the technicalities, China’s investment i...

Islamabad, Pakistan — In a series of trips over the past three months, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has tried to convince the debt-strapped country’s three closest allies — China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — to invest in the nation, as its precariously positioned economy looks for green shoots. In June last year, under Sharif’s first tenure as prime minister, the government formed a Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), a high-powered body comprising Pakistani civilian and military leaders, to promote investment in Pakistan. Following the tours to Beijing, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the Sharif government is pointing towards a raft of memorandums of understanding signed on those trips as indicators of potential investment coming to P...

The key to Sri Lanka's transition from stabilisation to full economic recovery is sustaining the ongoing reform momentum, the IMF said on Friday after it decided to release the third tranche of $336 million from the $2.9 billion four year bailout package to the island nation. While releasing the third tranche, the IMF on Thursday noted that Sri Lanka's economy has started recovering, inflation remained low, revenue collection was improving, and reserves continued to accumulate but warned that despite these positive developments, the economy is still vulnerable and the path to debt sustainability remains knife-edged We encourage the (Sri Lankan) authorities to continue to build on these hard-won gains and remain steadfast with their reform commitments, Peter Breuer, the head of the S...

The economy appears to be at a crossroads. For a variety of reasons, the general optimism people had about it in pre-pandemic times has been replaced with apprehensions. And while a privileged minority, sitting in their high castles, continue to enjoy a larger and larger share of the fruits of "development," it is becoming obvious that the vast majority are increasingly struggling.  On a national scale, what is worrying is that economic growth itself is slowing down. On April 2, the World Bank revealed that it projects Bangladesh's real GDP growth to remain relatively subdued at 5.6 percent in the current fiscal year and at 5.7 percent in the following year, lower than the average annual growth rate of 6.6 percent over the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. Similarl...