Columnist

As the new year dawns, there is finally some good news on the economic front in Pakistan. Celebrating Pakistan’s economic turnaround, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif recently told the nation that the economy was finally “out of the woods.”

Greg Mankiw’s name needs no introduction. Principles of Economics, Mankiw’s famous introductory text, remains one of my favorite books. Written in simple language, it opened up the world of economics to me.

The rather alarming recent flare-up in South Asia took me back a few years to a lecture on international relations in a US graduate school. The professor, a Straussian or an extreme hawk, was passionately arguing about the efficacy of a US “preventive war” in the Middle East.

As the trade wars between different nations escalate, there is a realistic chance that the present rules-based economic order–the Bretton Woods system, if you will– put in place after the second world war, could eventually unravel.