President Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum (PBIF) Mian Zahid Hussain has said that massive retrenchment of Pakistani workers in KSA may result in a permanent fall of two billion dollars in remittances while their plight will have a negative impact on the country's economy. He said 90 percent of the workers remittances came from KSA, UK, US, UAE and GCC countries which had showing dismal performance.
He said continued weakness in the external sector might force country to knock the door of IMF again. Three vital sectors considered important for keeping the forex reserves including exports, remittances and foreign direct investment were declining while imports the main drag on reserves continued to increase, he said.
If the trend continued, the government which was planning to abandon IMF programme in the current fiscal would have to enter another programme, he warned. Mian Zahid Hussain said that exports continued to fall since three years but corrective measures were not taken despite the insistence of local exporters, IMF and other institutions.
The government had given some relaxations to the exporters which were not enough in the current tough global market environment, he added. Mian Zahid said Pakistan received 63 million dollars as FDI in July in which 54 million were meant for the stock market, adding the rest of the small amount was for important sectors which indicated a 48 percent fall. He said reforms including agri package, auto policy, tax on bank transactions, tax amnesty scheme, efforts to bring traders and property market in the tax net etc had not proved successful multiplying problems for the government.