SEAnews 2020-02-12 ArtNo.46690

【Islamabad】Pakistan's external affairs would remain challenging throughout 2020, having serious implications on economy and security, including tense relations with India, a Pakistani think-tank said on January 26.
　Tense relations with India would continue to consume much of Pakistan's strategic and diplomatic bandwidth, Islamabad Policy Institute said in its report 'Pakistan Outlook 2020: Politics, Economy & Security'. Also, the peace process in Afghanistan would in near future continue to be marred by uncertainty, Dawn news quoted the report as saying.
　The report also highlighted that navigating China-US competition will test craft of Pakistani policy-makers in near term.
　About ties with the US, it said, it is a near certainty that bilateral engagement will remain limited to the minimum agenda of Afghanistan for foreseeable future and transactional nature of the relationship will continue," the paper reported.
　On the economic front, the report projected that Pakistan's GDP growth would remain close to 2.5 per cent because of slowdown specifically in large scale manufacturing and agriculture sectors.

○Former Finance Minister Hafeez Pasha says actual GDP growth is 1.9pc

【Islamabad】Dr Hafeez Pasha, a top economist, has questioned the working of the financial managers of the incumbent regime in borrowing the loans from the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and calculating the GDP in last financial year 2018-19.
　"The government has done a strange act which was never happened in past as it borrowed last year Rs3,000 billion from the State Bank and in advance before the year to end it has cleverly borrowed Rs1,200 billion prior to going into IMF programme knowing the fact that IMF bans the government from getting loans from the SBP. And more interestingly," he said, "the said Rs1200 billion amount is included in the Rs11,000 billion of debt so far piled by the government."
　Dr Pasha said that GDP growth figure of 3.3 percent is not right rather it was 1.9 percent and during the current financial year it would be hovering between 1.2 or 1.3 percent. He said that according him and his team's estimates in last year one million people got unemployed and this year about 1.2 million will lose their jobs as the economy will further be contracted this year. He said that the country is experiencing severe kind of stagflation which means high inflation and lowest rate of production and employment.
【News source】

Pakistan's external affairs to be challenging in 2020; ties to remain tense with India: Think-tank

Pakistan Outlook 2020: Politics, Economy & Security

Hafeez Pasha says actual GDP growth is 1.9pc

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