ISLAMABAD: The Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OICCI) has proposed that the government should prepare National Industrial Policy (NIP) up to 20 years to ensure consistency and competitiveness.

In a letter to Secretary Industries, Imdad Bosal, OICCI’s Executive Director, Kashif Shafi gave reference to OICCI’s letter of April 19 2022, and “submitted preliminary feedback on the Petrochemical and Plastics sectors policy in response to the sectoral policies shared by your office via letter dated March 15, 2022.

Following up on the previous letter, the OICCI has now submitting a detailed, comprehensive set of recommendations, including all previous submissions, on six of the fourteen identified sectors in which our members prominently operate. A detailed document has been shared with the Ministry.”

According to Kashif Shafi, Industrial policy should explicitly lay down the objectives that it wants to achieve along with the strategies to be adopted (OICCI has suggested certain objectives in the document for e.g. target manufacturing to GDP ratio, target annual growth rates for the sector, etc).

The Chamber further submitted that: (i) the policy should be adopted for longer term time periods (10 to 20 years) because industrial investment requires longer payback periods. This step will provide consistency to the policy and confidence to the corporates and foreign investors to develop their business cases; (ii) ensure cost competitiveness (recommendations on incentives to reduce costs such as duty-free imports of new plant and machinery, tax credits, etc); (iii) provision of infrastructure to improve supply chain connections (utility provision, access to credit lines, etc); and (iv) improve ease of doing business (single-window solutions, automation, simplification of taxation requirements and reporting, as well as regulatory procedures).

The OICCI has submitted its recommendations on taxation, trade (import and export), provision of public goods and services, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), in addition to sector specific policy recommendations i.e. petrochemical and plastics, food and agriculture, chemicals, cable and conductors, hydrocarbons and lubricants and refineries sector.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022