The Coordinator to Federal Tax Ombudsman Meher Kashif Younis Thursday said Pakistan needs to improve its overall relationship with neighbouring countries to boost volume of regional trade.
Speaking at a seminar on “ Diversification of Marets “ held under the aegis of Gold Ring Economic Forum, a strategic think tank, he said there are several second-tier export markets where we need to penetrate deeper that include Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Turkey etc.
He said Pakistan’s exports go to about 200 countries. Pakistan tries to pursue a very inclusive geopolitical policy to retain all these markets. And obviously, it makes sense if it takes special diplomatic care of the markets from where anything between 1% and 20% or more of its total export earnings originate.
Meher Kashif Younis said what’s perturbing is that we have so far not exploited the true potential of exports within Asia — the region that is now serving as the growth engine of the world economy.
He said in addition to China (with our annual exports at $2.781bn), only three Asian countries feature on the list of export destinations from where we earn half a billion dollars.
In FY22, export earnings from the UAE totalled $1.843bn (5.9pc of the total), followed by Bangladesh at $871m (2.8pc of the total) and Afghanistan at $552m (1.8pc of the total).
He said our export earnings from the US, China and the UK account for more than a third of total exports of goods and services. And more than two third of the total comes from 11 nations.—APP
