Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf was misguided by the economic team that National Accountability Bureau's (NAB) daily corruption estimate exceeded the total income of the country, economists maintain. The size of the economy is defined by total GDP, which at present is around Rs 23,000 billion.
Therefore, daily corruption of Rs 7 billion amounts to an annual figure of Rs 2,555 billion, which is far less than the size of the economy. Therefore, the Prime Minister's logic is flawed, economists argue. Former Finance Minister Salman Shah said that corruption has reached alarming levels and added that the figure given by NAB was "very low" as compared to GDP of $240 billion.
Corruption leads to an escalation in the price of projects, Dr Shah stated. A significant volume of corruption has been taking place in tax collection and the NAB was not referring to corruption in the national budget but in the national economy, he added and acknowledged that the Prime Minister may have been misguided by the economic team.
Dr Tariq, Professor in School of Economics, at Quaid-e-Azam University stated that corruption can exceed total income because the critical factor may well be the circulation of money or the number of times each rupee is circulated within economy. Dr Tariq said that the NAB's figure of Rs 7 billion daily corruption was not unrealistic as Transparency International Pakistan (TIP) has also reported corruption of Rs 15,000 billion during the last five years, which supports NAB's figure. The situation, he said, "reflects that corruption has been decentralised with a large number of people involved in it."
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