Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum's (PBIF) president Mian Zahid Hussain said here on Monday that Pakistan should not be lured by catchy slogans regarding opening of its market to India unilaterally as such a move will only damage the backbone of our economy, agriculture, besides slowing down hundreds of industries.
Talking to industrialists, he said that free-market economy has increased number of billionaire in almost all the countries, thereby hurting poor and causing harm to environment and natural resources. Moreover, free-market has resulted in exploitation of labourers and increased incidence of child labour, human trafficking, tax-frauds, money-laundering and social inequality, he opined.
Elaborating, he said that many countries damaged their economies due to trade agreements while world saw a number of global economic crises hurting every human on earth. These crises, he added, compelled the United States, the torch-bearer of capitalism, to abandon its philosophy to initiate largest nationalisation move the world has ever seen.
"In fact, globalisation instead of achieving its objectives concerning eradication of extreme poverty has only worsened the problems by throwing world into acute developmental crisis," he said, adding that economic globalisation could not increase integration and inter-dependence of national, regional and local economies across the world through cross-border movement of goods, services, technologies and capital which was meant to lift billions out of poverty, minimise conflicts and ensure sustainable peace.
Besides, improved quality of goods at reduced prices due to competition, bridging gap between rich and poor and saving people from colonisation, eradicating modern-day slavery by influential multinationals also remained attractive slogans, he added.