Pakistan is expected to register an economic growth of four percent in the 2012-13 financial year despite facing regional security challenges and ongoing global contraction, Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh said on Friday.
Shaikh, who is in Washington for Economic Working Group meetings with US officials, told a Washington think tank that an IMF assessment of the Pakistani economy, released on Thursday, had nothing new in it and that the Fund and Pakistan worked together closely.
The finance minister was careful in commenting on the influential finance institution’s observations on the state of Pakistani economy and said he looked forward to discussing any gap in economic growth forecast with the Fund’s leaders in his meetings next week.
He stressed that the government recognised the challenges facing the economy and was focused on remedying the problems in areas like tax revenue generation.
Shaikh said the democratic government inherited a bleak fiscal situation and despite facing a spate of regional security challenges, great floods and global economic downturn, Pakistan had steadfastly followed its policies of austerity and key reforms.
The measures helped arrest inflation rate that was ballooning around 25 percent only a few years ago, spur growth and devolve greater share of development resources to provinces, the finance minister told the gathering at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was moderated by senior Carnegie Associate Ashley Tellis.
The minister informed the gathering that Islamabad had also been able to double the tax revenue in the last four years and all financial institutions were working independently, free of any political pressure.
“The political government took some difficult decisions to fix the problems,” he said. “The GDP growth rate is picking up and we expect that to be in the four-plus range,” he told the gathering of South Asian analysts and foreign policy experts.
Shaikh added Pakistan had “a lot of work to do” to put the economy on a path that met development needs and raised the standard of life of its people.
