Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said that Singapore and Pakistan will begin negotiations next month on a bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Prime Minister Lee described current trade ties as 'modest' in comparison with the city-state's links with other South Asian countries, Singapore Radio reported Friday.
He noted that Singapore was already concluding a FTA with India and had begun exploratory talks with Sri Lanka, but had not yet made any progress with Pakistan. Singapore's trade with Pakistan totalled $1.02 billion last year making it Singapore's 45th-largest trading partner.
Meanwhile, Prasenjit K. Basu, Managing Director of Robust Economic Analysis Pte Ltd in Singapore in an interview said that Pakistan was not really on the radar screen of the world economy until about three or four years ago when the economic reforms under the current Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz began and Pakistan sorted out its external debt problems in the first couple of years after President Musharraf took office in a coup.
"According to him Pakistan was still a rather small trading partner of Singapore.
Pakistan produces cotton textiles, sugar, rice, etc and exports some of these products to Singapore, but it has a fairly good appetite for Singapore products and services and so relations between Pakistan and Singapore would probably grow over time".
He said that Pakistan was a fairly fast-growing economy welcoming foreign investments, but infrastructure bottlenecks were certainly a bit of a problem.
"Political stability over the medium and long-term is another issue that we have to be somewhat wary of and also, Pakistan is in a very volatile part of the world especially on its Western frontier where there is insurgent activity. But it has an environment now which is very welcoming of foreign investors and so opportunities for businesses are growing," he remarked.