The budget for the next fiscal year is meaningless in view of the government's performance figures, Vice-Chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Saturday. Terming the budget a jugglery of figures, he said that the government had presented a budget every year and then proceeded to completely ignore it, adding that at the year end, the actual revenue and spending figures had no semblance with the original budget.
Addressing a press conference at Multan airport, he said that the massive budget deficit was devouring almost all available bank debts and resulting in heavy monetisation of the deficit through recourse to huge borrowings from the State Bbank of Pakistan.
Dr Khalid Khakwani and Nadeem Qureshi agreed that the budget for the next fiscal year "does not address any fundamental structural problems" being faced by the country.
According to them, there was nothing substantive which dealt with the high rate of inflation, increasing unemployment, low savings and investment rates, inadequate and unfair revenue base, massive losses in public sector enterprises, huge unproductive government expenditures or low investment in people's welfare. They said that without spurring industrial growth, the government's actions were directly adding to the misery of the citizens and businesses.
On the one hand, heavy fiscal deficits and their monetisation were stoking inflation, making the life difficult for the common man. On the other, by crowding out the private sector borrowings and with the intensification of the energy crisis industry and businesses were being starved of gas and electricity and investment had collapsed to its lowest level in the last 50 years.
"This means that the economic growth seen in the country over the last four years, which was the lowest in the last 50 years for any four-year period in the country's history, is set to continue at an anaemic level for the next few years, unless fundamental reforms are undertaken."
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