KARACHI: Irfan Iqbal Sheikh, the president of FPCCI, has said that the private sector is under enormous distress and its investments have dried up due to 21 percent key policy rate, extreme volatility in rupee-dollar parity, poor economic policymaking, absence of support package to cope up with the lingering aftermath of historic floods and multiple rounds of major upward revisions of electricity and gas tariffs.

He said the IMF programme has brought the economic activities to a standstill. “We have never seen such a lack of ease of doing of business in the history of Pakistan,” he added.

FPCCI chief highlighted that exports have declined by 15 percent in eight months of the current fiscal year, remittances down by 20 percent except March 2023, Asian Development Bank (ADB) has cut down Pakistan’s economic growth forecast for FY23 to 0.6 and World Bank has projected it at 0.4 percent, no reliable data is available on the current state of unemployment in the country, gap between interbank and open market continues to remain rickety and containers are still not released smoothly.

He said that Pakistan’s domestic debt has climbed up to 27 trillion rupees as compared to 16.5 trillion rupees just a decade back and it has battered the ability of government to invest in infrastructural development, promoting industrialisation, providing targeted subsidies to export-oriented industries and health, education, skills development, women empowerment and other social uplift avenues.

He maintained that increasing the budgeted tax collection target of 7,004 billion rupees to 8,709 billion rupees on the dictates of IMF will further tax the already tax, instead of broadening and simplification of the taxation system.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023