ISLAMABAD: Pakistani economists questioned the government’s claim that its stringent economic measures, initiated during the outgoing year, would help it make 2020 the year of public prosperity while talking to Arab News on Wednesday. The federal cabinet on Tuesday discussed the challenges and achievements made to revive the country’s fragile economy in 2019 and set its priorities accordingly for this year to provide relief to the common man.
“Prime Minister Imran Khan has termed 2020 as the year of economic prosperity and vowed to transfer benefits of economic stabilization to the poor and underprivileged,” Firdous Ashiq Awan, Special Assistant to the PM on Media and Broadcasting, told journalists after the cabinet meeting. She said that Khan would launch a Rs6 billion subsidy program in the first week of January to provide edible items to the underprivileged on subsidized rates. In the second week of this month, a financial assistance card for the poor would also be launched, she added.
“We are committed to providing food and shelter to the poor across Pakistan,” Awan said. Listing differing economic achievements in the outgoing year, she said the current account deficit decreased by 73 percent, trade deficit by 40 percent while exports witnessed an increase of 4.7 percent, foreign exchange reserves improved by 14 percent, and tax collection increased by 17 percent due to the “prudent policies” of the government.
Independent economists, however, said that all economic improvement would prove temporary if the government failed to turn the bleeding state-owned enterprises into profitable institutions. “The main challenge for the government is to ensure structural reforms in the loss-making public institutions and turn them either into profit-making organizations or privatize them,” Dr. Vaqar Ahmed, senior economist and joint executive director at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), told Arab News.
He said that the government would also have to introduce “cogent reforms” in the power sector to curtail circular debt and spend the money on other public welfare projects. “Social protection of the poor and job creation are relatively easy tasks, but the real challenge remains the revitalization of the loss-making entities,” he said. “Otherwise the monster of fiscal deficit may return again.”
Dr. Athar Ahmad, a senior economist, said the government’s measures in the last year and a half had resulted in the shrinkage of industry and economy, adding that this needed to be reversed immediately through job creation and easing inflationary pressure. “The government needs to focus on the expansion of industrial and agricultural growth to increase its exports and create new jobs,” he said, urging the authorities to launch new development and housing projects as well to revive the economy.
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