World News | Finance Minister Ishaq Dar admits economic situation in Pakistan is sluggish

Karachi [Pakistan]Dec 30 (ANI): Despite acknowledging the problems in the economy, Pakistani Finance Minister Ishakhdar assured investors that “Pakistan will not default”.

“We are in a tight spot. We don’t have the $24 billion in foreign exchange reserves that our (previous) government left in 2016. But it’s not my fault. It’s the system’s fault,” Dar told investors at the commemorative ceremony, according to the Pakistan News Agency. Pakistan’s first development real estate investment trust plans to list on the stock exchange, the report said.

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Dar also criticized “pseudo-intellectuals” for raising the possibility of a sovereign default despite the country’s $1 billion Islamic bond payment earlier this month.

“There is no way Pakistan will default,” he said in a major retrograde speech delivered via video link.

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Dar also criticized “pseudo-intellectuals” for raising the possibility of a sovereign default despite the country’s $1 billion Islamic bond payment earlier this month, Dawn newspaper reported.

Citing international experience, Pakistan’s central bank said in its annual report that countries that prioritized growth at the expense of prices and financial stability were unable to “sustain growth and experience repeated boom-bust cycles following financial crises”.

According to Dawn, in its report on “Economic Conditions for FY22”, SBP estimated growth in FY23 to be below the low range set for that year. It further stated that the growth rate will remain below 3-4%.

According to the SBP report, supply-side factors, such as changes in energy and food prices, can be caused by a combination of domestic and international developments and are often difficult to predict. Inflation depends on the outlook for developments in international commodity prices and exchange rates, the report said. As reported by Dawn, the SBP report stated that “In Pakistan, the coverage and timeliness of information needs to be improved, and ‘annual’ GDP has frequently undergone substantial revisions to growth estimates relative to provisional estimates. These, coupled with the scarcity of high-frequency real sector data, Complicates forecasting and real-time decision-making.” (Arney)

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