Finance Minister highlights Pakistan’s roadmap to address economic challenges

WASHINGTON: Federal Minister for Finance and Revenue Muhammad Aurangzeb, who is leading Pakistan’s delegation in the IMF and World Bank-2024 Spring Meetings in Washington DC highlighted the country’s roadmap to cope with the confronted challenges and put economy on sustainable growth trajectory.

In an interactive session with Atlantic Council’s Geo-Economics Center and South Asia Center titled “Opportunities and Challenges for the Pakistani Economy through 2024 and Beyond”, he outlined Pakistan’s key measures to achieve economic stabilization by increasing tax-to-GDP ratio, undertaking end-to-end digitalization of FBR, reforming State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), boosting exports, increasing remittances, improving business environment and attracting foreign direct investments.

Sharing Pakistan’s current economic landscape, he said the country had entered in a much better shape this year than the beginning of the last year, adding it had to do a lot with the nine-month SBA programme which in turn “ushered in a macroeconomic stability for the country.”

He said the country’s overall GDP was moving in the right direction, although the headline number was not that significant, however different sectors were performing well.

He said, agriculture witnessed 5 percent growth owing to bumper crop; services sector was moving quite well and inflation had come down from the peak of 37-38 percent to closer to 20-22 percent while the exchange rate was stable.

“So all of this has moved us in the right direction, now we will take it forward from here [for which] we need, in the first instance, permanence in the macroeconomic stability,” adding the government had initiated discussion with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the larger and extended programme that would help put economy on sustainable growth path .

The finance minister was of the view that the ”timely decisions and timely executions” were the key aspects to run even a smallest institution or the largest country on the planet  .”

He said Pakistan does not need too many policy prescriptions as “we have known what and why, not for years but the decades.”

Aurangzeb said Pakistan was looking for a larger and extended programme as it would need two-three year time period to go through the structural reforms programme.

The finance minister termed discussions with IMF mission that visited Pakistan last month for the 2nd and final review of the SBA programme ‘very constructive and positive.’

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Talking about revenue generation, the minister said the government on short term basis intends to cut down on the leakages  [in revenue collection] and ensure speedy decisions by tax tribunals.