Alarming picture: Capital flight

The governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, Yasin Anwar, is perhaps the first senior official to concede that capital is being moved out of the country in very large sums, and also to quantify it. In his testimony before senators on Tuesday, Mr Anwar said $25m were being ‘smuggled’ out of the country in briefcases every day from four major airports — Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Quetta. He did not say how the bank had worked out the size of the illegal capital outflows and since when this practice had been going on — and these gaps in information have left some economists puzzled. However, even if half this staggering amount is going out of the country each day, it would confirm how porous our custom checkpoints have become, not least because of corruption and weak controls.

words	meanings	usage
concede	admit; acknowledge antonym: deny	He was not prepared to concede that he had acted illegally. I had to concede that I’d overreacted.
quantify	determine the number of; tell antonym: guess	The risks to health are impossible to quantify. It's difficult to quantify how many people will be affected by the change.
work out	calculate; find out by calculation	to work out an answer. to work out a sum
outflow	flowing out antonym: inflow	Capital outflow took place on a very large scale. The central bank has announced controls on capital outflows.
porous	having many small holes; penetrable antonym: impenetrable	porous brick walls. porous material/rocks

(Dawn 03 October 2013)