Reacting on the budgetery proposals, former president and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari has said that while the party is yet to give its detailed observations both inside and outside the parliament, he felt constrained to remark that the budget failed to address critical issues in documenting economy, improving revenue collection, preventing tax evasion, and addressing the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.
Spokesperson Senator Farhatullah Babar said that the former president was disappointed that the financial proposal failed to address some fundamental issues.
It has miserably failed to explain how the alarming downslide of agriculture sector will be tackled, what steps will be taken to end the growing frustration of government employees and wage-earners and in tackling environmental degradation and climate change that are intricately linked to economic development, Babar quoted the former president as saying.
Zardaro said the government has manipulated figures like the GDP growth, tax to GDP ratio, unemployment and inflation rates and fiscal deficit.
Budgetary proposals that are based on divided figures and faulty assumptions are fated to accelerate economic downslide and increase frustration. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics not being an independent has lent credence to the assertion that figures have been manipulated, he said.
China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) holds the key to our economic development, yet there was no hint as to how the government intends to address the rising frustration in smaller provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that the government has gone back on the decision of the All Parties Conference (APC) on May 28, 2015 to build the western route of the corridor on priority basis, he said.
The PPP leader said that economy will continue to be in a spin as long as the government borrows more and more from foreign lenders to retire domestic debt, adding that government’s issuing foreign currency bonds at a rate much higher than prevailing rates in the region is disastrous for the economy and raises questions about who the real beneficiary is.