“Tis but thy name, that is my enemy,” said Juliet Capulet, upon learning that the love of her life came from mortal enemies of her own clan. Continuing to address the object of her desire, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” It is not often that a situation in contemporary times resembles this famous scene from the 16th century play as closely as the relationship between the IMF and Pakistan’s economic managers. Simply replace the “star cross’d” lovers with Pakistan’s soft-spoken, hard-hitting finance minister and the IMF’s head honcho on the stand-by arrangement, and Sheikh appears to be wooing the Fund with a similar reasoning. After all, an indirect tax collected at every stage based on the differential between input and output values will generate the same amount of revenues for the government, regardless of whether it is called value-added tax, ...