Former federal finance minister Shaukat Tarin on Tuesday predicted that the country’s economic growth will be negative by the end of current fiscal year and dismissed the incumbent government’s claim to economic growth between 1 percent and 1.5 percent.
He expressed these views while addressing a party’s seminar held here to unveil the PTI’s ‘whitepaper on the state of Pakistan’s economy’. He said industries were shutting down while large-scale manufacturing, agriculture, exports and remittances were all in the negative zone.
“Textile sector, which constitutes 64 percent of the country’s export, was seeing a decline in its export of around US $2.2 billion per month and over 1.5 million textile workers have been laid off. In this bleak situation if someone believes that the economy will register a growth, he lives in a fool’s paradise,” he said.
Talking about the PML-N performance between 2013 and 2018, he said the PTI government inherited a US $19.2 billion current account deficit from the previous PML-N government while the foreign reserves stood at US $9.4 billion. “Moreover, we were also handed over an overvalued rupee by 23 percent, which was against the wisdom of keeping it undervalued to encourage exports.
The PML-N was trying to artificially control the rupee value and this led to a decrease in our exports. In 2013, our exports stood at US $24.8 billion, which declined to US $22 billion in 2016/17. Hence, a strong rupee became a cause for the decline in our exports,” he added.
