ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Pakistan has been beleaguered by terrorism and security “challenges” but was still managing to focus on growth and job-creation, Finance Minister Senator Muhammad Ishaq Dar told CNBC international.
“Pakistan’s economy has shown great resilience against the global trend of developing countries and the emerging markets which have seen negative declines,” Muhammad Ishaq Dar told the channel.
Ishaq Dar is currently leading a Pakistani delegation at the annual meeting of Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Frankfurth (Germany).
“We have shown seven-year high growth in the last fiscal year and in the current year we hope to cross 5 percent. We are aiming at a growth rate of 7 percent in the next two fiscal years so things are moving quite nicely,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the Asia Development Bank (ADB) in Frankfurt, the CNBC reported.
“But we had two serious challenges apart from macro-economic stability which is now in order, one was security and extremism and in June 2014, Pakistan took a bold decision to have an all-out war against terrorism and it’s a fairly costly item,” he said.
Dar told CNBC that his country faced enormous challenges after the 2013 general election which was won by Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party.
“The security challenges that Pakistan were facing at the time of the last general election in 2013 were what I call the three major ‘E’s’: Extremism, Economy and Energy,” he said.
“We took all the three E’s on and we’ve had great successes so far in the macro-economic stability side and we are now working on the growth trajectory, job creation and things are moving on fine and security is equally important and so is the energy.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave Pakistan a $6.6 billion loan in 2013 under a three-year program designed to help stabilize the economy. It has, as of March this year, received around $5.5 billion of that aid. Pakistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to have grown 4.5 percent this fiscal year, the IMF noted.
In March 2016 following a review of Pakistan’s economic performance in light of the aid program, the IMF concluded that the country was reaching fiscal targets and that economic activity had “continued to gradually gain strength,” Mitsuhiro Furusawa, the Fund’s deputy managing director said in the report.
Furusawa added, 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.”
