Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Friday said the budget reflects the same lack of vision and political will that has characterised last four years and which in this period has left Pakistan behind almost all other developing economies in the pursuit of development and welfare of its citizens.
A PTI spokesman termed the annual budget exercise meaningless on the basis of the performance statistics released in Economic Survey by the government on Thursday. He said that it was also like previous years a budget, which was dead on arrival and grossly wrong in estimating the fiscal deficit.
"For example Rs 250 billion and growing of over due payables to IPP's are not accounted for anywhere in budget...we are likely to end next year with another deficit exceeding 8 percent of the GDP and the economy sunk further in a debt trap", he added. He further said that there is nothing substantive in Budget 2012-13 which deals with high rate of inflation, increasing unemployment, low savings and investment rates, inadequate and unfair revenue base, massive losses in public sector enterprises, huge unproductive expenditure of government, low investment in the welfare of the citizens of the country or making Pakistan more competitive globally to spur exports.
The government has presented a budget each year and then proceeded to completely ignore it and end the year with no semblance to the original budget presented. Starting the year with a budget that set a target of 4.7 percent of GDP as the fiscal deficit, by its own admission will end the year with a budget deficit of almost 7 percent (including circular debt) and which in reality will probably end up close to 8 percent.