Daily Times

News reports that Large Scale Manufacturing (LSM) industries slowed to just 1.2 percent in the month of August, and eight out of 15 major industries recorded negative year-on-year growth according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), ought to seriously unnerve the government since it takes the wind out of the sails of the economic turnaround it had us all waiting for ever since the lockdown was lifted. This is a pretty abrupt change of trend since jut the month before, in July, LSM figures recorded a five percent jump when compared to the same period last year. Now everybody will be fearing that September numbers will be even worse because of all the excessive rains that disturbed trade and manufacturing activity.

Going forward, the government has set itself the rather ambitious growth target of 2.1 percent for the outgoing fiscal year even though the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects the figure closer to around one percent. That is extremely low growth for any country, especially one so deep in debt like Pakistan, since the repayment schedule will not change at all except the little breathing space that the G20 moratorium has got us. So another round of acute contraction of the economy might well be on the cards, which means another spike in the unemployment rate. The latter will worry the government even more than the larger economy since half the electoral cycle is already over and people will not forget the economic wounds they suffer now even at the time of the election.

So far all the government has said by way of explanation, whether about its economic policies or the trouble it sometimes faces in terms of diplomacy, is that everything was somebody else’s fault. And now this argument, which everybody bought early on since the last few administrations had indeed been eating off the fat of the land for all this time, just does not sell with the people anymore. Therefore, the ruling party needs to realise that the only way of making things better is by initiating and implementing all the reforms it talked about for all the years it was in the opposition. From civil services to the economy, particularly the export sector, everything is in need of serious repair. It is unfortunate that PTI seemed to know pretty well just what it needed to do before it came to power, but nothing became of all the big plans once it did. *