FRANKFURT – Federal Minister for Finance and Economics Affairs Senator Mohammad Ishaq Dar has said that Pakistanhas been beleaguered byterrorism and security challenges but is still managing tofocus on growth and job-creation.
“Pakistan’s economy has shown great resilience againstthe global trend of developing countries and the emergingmarkets which have seen negative declines,”he said while talking to the CNBC television channel. Dar is currently leading a Pakistani delegation atthe annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) here inGermany.
“We have shown seven-year high growth in the last fiscalyear and in the current year we hope to cross five percent. Weare aiming at a growth rate of seven percent in the next twofiscal years so things are moving quite nicely,” he said,speaking on the sidelines of the annual ADB meeting.
“But we had two serious challenges apart from macro-economic stability which is now in order, one was security andextremism and in June 2014, Pakistan took a bold decision tohave an all-out war against terrorism and it’s a fairly costlyitem,” he said.Dar told CNBC that his country faced enormous challengesafter the 2013 general election which was won by Nawaz Sharifand his Pakistan Muslim League-N party.
“The security challenges that Pakistan were facing atthe time of the last general election in 2013 were what I callthe three major ‘E’s’: Extremism, Economy and Energy,” hesaid. “We took all the three E’s on and we’ve had greatsuccesses so far in the macro-economic stability side and weare now working on the growth trajectory, job creation andthings are moving on fine and security is equally importantand so is the energy.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave Pakistan a$6.6 billion loan in 2013 under a three-year program designedto help stabilise the economy. It has, as of March this year,received around $5.5 billion of that aid. Pakistan’s grossdomestic product (GDP) is expected to have grown 4.5 percentthis fiscal year, the IMF noted.
In March 2016, following a review of Pakistan’s economicperformance in light of the aid programme, the IMF concludedthat Pakistan was reaching fiscal targets and that economicactivity had continued to gradually gain strength, MitsuhiroFurusawa, the fund’s deputy managing director, said in thereport.
However, that building on these gains,further progress, including in the area of structural reforms,is needed to generate strong and inclusive growth and make the
economy more resilient and competitive,” Furusawa added.
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