The Punjab is the only province, which witnessed budget deficit of Rs 25.496 billion, and contributed a lot in the overall fiscal deficit of the country that stays at 2.7 per cent. However, Sindh, the NWFP and Balochistan experienced no deficit in the first six months of the current financial year, showing that they went in surplus. Sindh has gone in surplus of Rs4.747 billion, the NWFP Rs13.050 billion and Balochistan Rs14.534 billion.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Pakistan’s constitutional structure regarding distribution of taxation powers between the federation and the federating units. In all major federations — the US, Canada, and India — the federating units have the exclusive right to levy tax on goods and services transacted within their geographical boundaries. In Pakistan, the Constituent Assembly took away the right of levying sales tax on goods from provinces in 1948. In the seventh award as well all the four provinces conceded that forthcoming Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods will be levied by the Centre.

vijay prashad on the darker nations
The book is a history of the Third World project. It is this project's development that I trace from the 1920s to the 1980s. A wide range of initiatives came together in a relatively coherent platform of demands that was pushed at various United Nations and international forums. That project was assassinated in the 1980s by a combination of the exhaustion of the way the various regimes operated in their societies, by the debt crisis (itself a product of a newly confident financial capitalism), the collapse of the Soviet Union, etc. The people who live in the societies that once adopted the Third World project of course live on, and certainly they are making history. But not on the same platform as they once were.
(...) I believe that the contours of the Third World project need to be totally rethought. For instance, the Third World project did not fully grapple with the problem posed by an energetic and "free" finance capital, whose own relations to the state changed in the 1960s and 1970s. Castro, at the 1983 NAM meeting, raised this problem, but it was generally discounted. He proposed, for instance, that there be a Third World debt servicing payments strike. This would have been a very powerful way to at least reveal the power of finance capital, and its stranglehold on sustainable development. It was not to be, as I recount.
(...) From my point of view, the basic thesis of the national liberation women's rights platform is this: that their societies are torn by sexist traditions; that their states are plagued by misogynist laws; but that their social and political histories demonstrate that women within these societies can challenge national liberation and the Third World project to extend itself in a positive direction. They rejected "humanitarian interventionism" at the same time as they called for an internationalist critique of sexist injustice. The women in these movements had no illusions that their were problems within their political parties and formations, that they needed to fight on many fronts – against allies and enemies. That is the basic point of "Cairo." The UN dynamic that led to Beijing (1995) draws from this lineage.

amilcar cabral on culture and national liberation (1970):
In order to escape this choice--which may be called the dilemma of cultural resistance--imperialist colonial domination has tried to create theories which, in fact, are only gross formulations of racism, and which, in practice, are translated into a permanent state of siege of the indigenous populations on the basis of racist dictatorship (or democracy). This, for example, is the case with the so-called theory of progressive assimilation of native populations, which turns out to be only a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question.
(...) [on giving culture a place in materialist view of history] The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies.
(...) History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress.
(...) [does he distance himself from progressive views of culture, if culture is melded to history?]
Thus it is understood that imperialist domination by denying the historical development of the dominated people, necessarily also denies their cultural development. It is also understood why imperialist domination, like all other foreign domination for its own security, requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.
(...) [he is confused, in my opinion: because understands that the old metrics no longer apply] In our time it is common to affirm that all peoples have a culture. The time is past when, in an effort to perpetuate the domination of a people, culture was considered an attribute of privileged peoples or nations, and when, out of either ignorance or malice, culture was confused with technical power, if not with skin color or the shape of one's eyes. The liberation movement, as representative and defender of the culture of the people, must be conscious of the fact that, whatever may be the material conditions of the society it represents, the society is the bearer and creator of culture. The liberation movement must furthermore embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture--which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society.
(...) [levels of culture?] In the specific conditions of our country--and we would say, of Africa--the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from villages to towns, from one ethnic group to another, from one age group to another, from the peasant to the workman or to the indigenous intellectual who is more or less assimilated, and, as we have said, even from individual to individual within the same social group, the quantitative and qualitative level of culture varies significantly.
(...) [durkheimian claims] In societies with a horizontal social structure, such as the Balante, for example, the distribution of cultural levels is more or less uniform, variations being linked uniquely to characteristics of individuals or of age groups. On the other hand, in societies with a vertical structure, such as the Fula, there are important variations from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. These differences in social structure illustrate once more the close relationship between culture and economy, and also explain differences in the general or sectoral behavior of these two ethnic groups in relation to the liberation movement.
(...) [much like fanon here] A reconversion of minds--of mental set--is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reonversion--re-Africanization, in our case--may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle.
(...) [has been working backward from this point, i suspect] Whatever may be the complexity of this basic cultural panorama, the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within it the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary in order to characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture.

Amilcar Cabral on class, colonization, and reclaiming the march of history (1966):
This leads us to pose the following question: does history begin only with the development of the phenomenon of ‘class’, and consequently of class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be to place outside history the whole period of life of human groups from the discovery of hunting, and later of nomadic and sedentary agriculture, to the organization of herds and the private appropriation of land. It would also be to consider — and this we refuse to accept — that various human groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism.
(...) This means that before the class struggle — and necessarily after it, since in this world there is no before without an after — one or several factors was and will be the motive force of history. It is not difficult to see that this factor in the history of each human group is the mode of production — the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership — characteristic of that group.
(...) If we accept this conclusion, then the doubts in our minds are cleared away. Because if on the one hand we can see that the existence of history before the class struggle is guaranteed, and thus avoid for some human groups in our countries — and perhaps in our continent — the sad position of being peoples without any history, then on the other hand we can see that history has continuity, even after the disappearance of class struggle or of classes themselves.
(...) [the three stages of history - and the end of agriculture?] In politico-economic language, the first stage would correspond to the communal agricultural and cattle-raising society, in which the social structure is horizontal, without any state; the second to feudal or assimilated agricultural or agro-industrial bourgeois societies, with a vertical social structure and a state; the third to socialist or communist societies, in which the economy is mainly, if not exclusively, industrial (since agriculture itself becomes a form of industry) and in which the state tends to progressively disappear, or actually disappears, and where the social structure returns to horizontality, at a higher level of productive forces, social relations and appreciation of human values.
(...) [imperialism: colonialism and neo-colonialism] On the question of the effects of imperialist domination on the social structure and historical process of our peoples, we should first of all examine the general forms of imperialist domination. There are at least two forms: the first is direct domination, by means of a power made up of people foreign to the dominated people (armed forces police, administrative agents and settlers); this is generally called classical colonialism or colonialism is indirect domination, by a political power made up mainly or completely of native agents; this is called neocolonialism.
(...) [on imperialism arresting the march of history] While in classical colonialism this process is paralyzed, neo-colonialist domination, by allowing the social dynamic to awaken (conflicts of interests between native social strata or class struggles), creates the illusion that the historical process is returning to its normal evolution. This illusion will be reinforced by the existence of a political power (national state) composed of native elements. In reality it is scarcely even an illusion, since the submission of the local ‘ruling’ class to the ruling class of the dominating country limits or prevents the development of the national productive forces.
(...) [nationalism as that which reorients, by reinvigorating, this 'march'] On the basis of this, we can state that national liberation is the phenomenon in which a given socio-economic whole rejects the negation of its historical process. In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected.
(...) [nationalism based in this march of history] ...for us the basis of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own history...
(...) [on 'backwardness' and where it fits] By saying this we do not wish to diminish the importance of other internal factors which are unfavorable to national liberation, such as economic under-development, the consequent social and cultural backwardness of the popular masses, tribalism and other contradictions of lesser importance. It should however be pointed out that the existence of tribes only manifests itself as an important contradiction as a function of opportunistic attitudes, generally on the part of detribalised individuals or groups, within the national liberation movements. Contradictions between classes, even when only embryonic, are of far greater importance than contradictions between tribes.
(...) [like fanon, nationalism on the basis of shared experience] But on the other hand the necessarily repressive nature of the neo-colonial state against the national liberation forces, the sharpening of contradictions between classes, the objective permanence of signs and agents of foreign domination (settlers who retain their privileges, armed forces, racial discrimination), the growing poverty of the peasantry and the more or less notorious influence of external factors all contribute towards keeping the flame of nationalism alive, towards progressively raising the consciousness of wide popular sectors and towards reuniting the majority of the population, on the very basis of awareness of neo-colonialist frustration, around the ideal of national liberation.
(...) [in colonial situation, nationalism is to socialism, as bourgeois revolution is to revolution] The colonial situation (in which the nation class fights the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country) can lead, apparently at least, to a nationalist solution (national revolution); the nation gains its independence and theoretically adopts the economic structure which best suits it. The neo-colonial situation (in which the working classes and their allies struggle simultaneously against the imperialist bourgeoisie and the native ruling class) is not resolved by a nationalist solution; it demands the destruction of the capitalist structure implanted in the national territory by imperialism, and correctly postulates a socialist solution.
(...) [on violence] We do not think we will shock this assembly by stating that the only effective way of definitively fulfilling the aspirations of the peoples, that is to say of attaining national liberation, is by armed struggle. This is the great lesson which the contemporary history of liberation struggle teaches all those who are truly committed to the effort of liberating their peoples.