Pakistan missed its gross domestic product (GDP) growth target for the current fiscal year by half as the growth has been assessed at 2.4 percent of the GDP against the budgetary GDP growth target of 4.5 percent, an official source said. The GDP growth halved mainly due to decline in agriculture growth assessed at 1.21 percent as compared to budgetary estimate of 3.8 percent, while the industrial growth recorded a negative growth of 0.07 percent against the projected target of 4.9 percent, only the services sector recorded a growth of 4.10 percent against the target of 4.7 percent.
The National Accounts Committee (NAC) on Wednesday approved the GDP growth estimates for the current fiscal year in accordance with the sectoral estimates for the first nine months (July-March) provided by the provinces and federal ministries. The provisional GDP growth of 2.4 percent is also less than the downward revised GDP growth target of 2.8 percent for the ongoing fiscal year. According to the source, the GDP growth estimate had remained lower due to the assessment on the basis of available data for the first nine months. If the meeting had taken into account the data of first 10 months then the growth figure could have been improved.
The committee relied on the crop estimates of provincial crop reporting units, as the meeting of the Federal Committee on Agriculture was not held which estimates Rabi crop production. The estimate of wheat crop was assessed at 24.2 million tonnes. The other factor responsible for lower agriculture growth was the decline in cotton production to 11.6 million bales as compared to the target of 14 million bales. If only wheat production had increased to 25 million tonnes, it would have significantly improved the GDP growth for the current fiscal year, he added.
With the availability of verified data for the last fiscal year, the NAC also revised downwards the GDP growth estimates for fiscal year 2009-10 from 4.1 percent to 3.8 percent of the GDP. The factors which resulted in downward revision in the GDP growth estimates of the last fiscal year were also the below-target performance of the agriculture sector.
