FINANCE Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb said on Wednesday that unchecked population growth and climate change are hindering Pakistan from becoming a $3 trillion economy.
In an interview, he referred to the impact of climate change on the economy and also explained as to why multinational companies were exiting Pakistan.
Pakistan is surely making progress on different fronts of the national economy but population growth and climate change are depriving it of the full benefits of the positive improvement. This is understandable as despite claims by the successive governments to have focused on the population bomb, the numbers are rapidly increasing, eating up our resources and leaving too little to be invested on developmental pursuits. According to the World Bank, the country’s population has crossed the 250 million mark and growth rate hovers around 2.55 percent. It should also be a source of concern for the relevant authorities that 45% of the population lives below the poverty line. Similarly, the Global Climate Risk Index 2025 has ranked Pakistan as the most vulnerable country to climate change. The remarks of the Finance Minister show the Government was alive to the challenge thrown by these two issues. While attempts are being made to devise medium and long term policies and plans to tackle the threat of climate change in close coordination with the provinces, there seems to be no worthwhile strategy to deal with the issue of rising population and the objective cannot be realized in a satisfactory manner without active cooperation of citizens. Apart from the problems identified by the Minister, there are also serious issues like unbearable burden of domestic and foreign loans, which consume major portion of the budgetary resources and compel the country to get more loans to pay back previous loans. The law envisages a cap on loans as a percentage of the GDP but this has not been treated as sacrosanct by successive governments. There is also the issue of rampant corruption in the system as highlighted by the Global State of Scams Report 2025 by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Feedzai, which said Pakistan is among the top developing countries losing a large portion of its economy to financial scams. It says based on Pakistan’s current GDP, the 2.5% loss so incurred equals about $9.3 billion, 33% more than the country’s $7 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, highlighting the staggering scale of damage caused by fraud and digital scams. There are specialized institutions and mechanisms to deal with the menace and these should be activated in the real sense of the word to stem the rot.
