THE Economic Survey, launched by Minister for Finance Shaukat Tarin, in the presence of Minister for Industries and Production Khusro Bakhtiyar, Commerce Adviser Razak Dawood, Special Assistant on Poverty Alleviation Sania Nishtar and SAPM on Revenue Waqar Masood, reflects remarkable growth in the outgoing financial year and a promising scenario for the next year.
It shows Pakistan’s economy rebounded strongly during the current fiscal year and posted a growth of around four percent, which is substantially higher than the previous two years especially when seen in the backdrop of different challenges including the one posed by the Covid-19.
The assessment of the economic performance of the country during the year shows the recovery was V-shaped on the back of broad-based growth in all sectors and that recovery has been achieved without compromising internal and external security.
It is, indeed, laudable that the agriculture sector and large scale manufacturing witnessed remarkable performance contributing their share to the overall GDP growth due to a variety of measures adopted by the Government to deal with the situation arising out of Covid-19 and provision of much-needed incentives.
The success of the Government strategy can be gauged by the fact that prior to Covid-19, the working population was55.74 million, which declined to 35.04 million meaning thereby that people either lost their jobs or were not able to work.
However, due to prudent decisions by the government, the working population reached 52.56 million till October, 2020 and it is hoped that the number would increase further as economic activities are gaining momentum due to incentives given by the Government for the construction, manufacturing and textile sectors and the proposed incentives for accelerated growth of the agricultural sector.
It is also significant to observe that for the first time in 17 years the country posted account surplus of $0.8 billion during July-April, FY2021; inflows of foreign exchange through the Roshan Digital Account(RDA) crossed the $1billion mark and in first ten months of the outgoing year workers’ remittances posted historically high growth of 29 percent reaching $ 24.2 billion.
Keeping in view the significant performance pertaining to FATF conditions, potential of exports and e-commerce, Pakistan has been added into Amazon’s seller list.
The FBR tax collection has witnessed a significant growth of around 18% during July-May FY2021 owing to the revival of domestic economic activity and ongoing comprehensive tax policy and administrative reforms, which have been carried out without harassing the tax-payers.
It was also during the year that Pakistan Stock Exchange earned the title of being the best Asian Stock Market and fourth best-performing market across the world in 2020 because of its impressive performance.
Though people of Pakistan have, throughout the year, been complaining about unbridled price-hike but as pointed out by the Finance Minister the Government did not pass on the increase in the prices of commodities such as crude oil, palm oil, sugar, wheat and tea in the international market to the domestic consumer.
Appreciably, the Government’s economic team is now concentrating on higher economic growth that would, hopefully, result in more job opportunities for people and mitigation of difficulties of the consumers.
