Economic Report - Chinese Interest in South Africa Grows

Listening and Doing Exercise:

Select Play button. Listen and fill in the blanks with suggest words

He	Khan	Learning	Many	Other	Pakistan	Pakistani	YouTube	difficult	five
in	income	is	more	occupational	of	says	so
tax	the	young

Pakistanis are increasingly concerned about their economy. Zafar Saeed directs an training center in Islamabad, the capital. For the past 10 years, center has trained thousands of people for work in an increasingly economy. Now, the business is struggling with issues ranging from loss electricity to inflation. Zafar Saeed blames the government for the situation. says his organization has suffered big financial losses in the last years. One of the reasons is long power outages. Another reason that inflation makes it hard for people to pay his fees they can learn skills that lead to income.

people share his opinion. Street protests against power outages are common Pakistan. Some outages can now last an entire day. Ashfaque Hassan is a professor at the NUST Business School in Islamabad. He there has been too little political will to fix the national system. Less than one percent of Pakistan's 180 million people pay taxes. About 70 percent of federal lawmakers did not complete any tax documents last year. As Professor Khan notes, that makes it difficult to ask major donors to the country for help. He other nations question why they should provide Pakistan with aid when does not tax its own wealthy citizens.

Sixty percent of the population is under the age of 25. Opinion surveys show that people are most concerned about economic problems and corruption.

For VOA English, I'm Laurel Bowman.) You can watch more captioned videos at VOA Learning English website and the VOA Learning English channel on

SCORE: