Capital Labour Substitution in the Large-scale Food-processing Industry in Pakistan: Some Recent Evidence
Food-processing is one of the first industries developed by man. Most agricultural commodities require some sort of processing for them to be edible. In primitive societies man processed his own food using the simple mortar and pestle. With the advent of industrialisation there emerged important implications for foodprocessing technologies. The workers in the industrial and commercial sectors of urban areas required greater supplies of food. This encouraged the establishment of processing plants supplemented by storage facilities to ensure that the urban population received the food that they required. Food-processing, therefore, began to occupy a fairly predominant position in the overall industrial sector. Its importance was heightened by its strong backward and forward linkages with the rest of the economy. In a labour-surplus developing economy, where most of the labour is unemployed or underemployed, the absorption of this surplus labour force in the industrial sector is an important issue. In recent decades, there has been significant growth in the industrial sector in most developing countries, in terms of both
The Time Profile of the Cost Structure in Pakistan’s Manufacturing Sector
The manufacturing sector of Pakistan has at times played the role of the leading sector of the economy. The successful experience of planned growth in the 1960s owes much to the special attention paid to the growth of manufacturing sector. Policies like the export bonus scheme, tax-holidays, subsidised import of capital, easy and subsidised loans and over-valued exchange rate, resulted in a substantial growth in the sector. However, with over-protection of the sector, nationalisation of some of the major industries in the 1970s and, later-on, over-employment in the nationalised industries, the performance of the sector started to deteriorate gradually. It is now widely believed that many of the manufacturing industries in Pakistan have become inefficient because they have not been exposed to competitive environment due to protective and distortionary policies. It is to be expected that distortions like those mentioned would have not only eroded the performance but also affected the behaviour of the manufacturing sector. It is therefore important to determine how productivity growth in the manufacturing sector has been retarded over time and what type of changes in technology have taken place in terms of their effects on factor intensities and on the firms, reaction to such changes in factor prices. An analysis of the changes over time in production technology of the manufacturing sector may provide an answer to these questions. The present study aims at analysing changes in the cost structure of Pakistan’s manufacturing sector over the past two decades in order to study the nature and speed of productivity growth; determine whether there exists any factor bias in the technological changes; and to analyse how technology has adjusted to absorb changes in the relative factor prices.
On Fascist Ideology
Fascism is a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism and, in the German case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Fascism, in its many forms did not hesitate to kill its own citizens as well as its colonial subjects in its search for ideological and political closure. Millions of civilians perished on a global scale during the apogee of fascist ideologies in Europe and beyond. In historical terms, fascism can be defined as a movement and a regime. Emilio Gentile – who, with Zeev Sternhell and George Mosse,2 is the most insightful historian of fascism – presents fascism as a modern revolutionary phenomenon that was nationalist and revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist. Gentile also presents fascism as being typically organized in a militaristic party that had a totalitarian conception of state politics, an activist and antitheoretical ideology as well as a focus on virility and anti-hedonistic mythical foundations. For Gentile a defining feature of fascism was its character as a secular religion which affirms the primacy of the nation understood as an organic and ethnically homogenous community. Moreover, this nation was to be hierarchically organized in a corporativist state endowed with a war-mongering vocation that searches for a politics of national expansion, potency and conquest. Fascism, in short, was not a mere reactionary ideology. Rather, fascism aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.3 The word fascism derives from the Italian word fascio and refers to a political group (such as the political group lead by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the time of Italian unification.) Fascism also refers visually and historically to a Roman imperial symbol of authority. Its place of birth as a modern political ideology was northern Italy, the year was 1919, and its founder was Benito Mussolini. Thus, fascism as a term as well as a political movement was born on the Italian peninsula. Its ideological origins, however, predated its name. The fact that fascism was born as a concept before its explicit birth as a movement is central to any understanding of fascism. The ideology of radical nationalism that made it possible was part of a larger intellectual reaction to the Enlightenment.4 This tradition was both European and, in the Latin American case, “non-European” as well. To be sure, the original ideology behind fascism was born as a reaction to the progressive European revolutions of the long nineteenth century (from the French revolution of 1789 to the American and Latin American revolutions of 1776 and the 1810s). Fascism represented a post-revolutionary attack against equality. The ideology of the anti-Enlightenment is the major root of the longstanding ideological tradition that created fascism. Its branches constituted a reaction against liberal politics and a rejection of democracy. And yet fascism did not oppose the market economy and put forward a corporatist organization that aimed to be functional to capitalist accumulation. Equally important, fascism is a philosophy of political action that ascribes value to absolute violence in the political realm. This ascription was boosted by one radical outcome of the