Daily Times

With Pakistan’s macroeconomic indicators on the right track, Prime Minister Imran Khan is strongly optimistic on making an economic turnaround despite some initial setbacks. When COVID-19 struck the world last year, Pakistan wasn’t expected to recover from a financial meltdown with gloomy predictions on the number of the cases and death toll. Yet the PM’s team managed to tackle the worse by following a smart lockdown strategy, introducing the Ehsaas program for the masses and implementing a robust vaccination policy which went smooth over time sans some minor hiccups.

The PM believes that Pakistan’s revised growth rate of four percent is a blessing in disguise given the bleak conditions of the global economy with India’s rate at a downhill of minus seven percent. This is largely due to the fact that Pakistan chose to thread carefully unlike India which opted for a European-style lockdown that caused a massive disaster which eventually led to an unprecedented increase in the number of cases and deaths.

What most analysts did not understand is that pandemic fighting strategies meant for the developed world cannot take place in the developing world. In fact, these strategies proved far worse for some European states and India followed them without any backup plans in place.

Nevertheless, PM Khan has rightly stated that uplifting multidimensional sectors is the need of the hour with special focus on reviving local tourism along with others such as the IT industry.

While it’s true that changing several finance ministers in the past three years was considered a bad omen, the overall outlook is positive in the long-run with the exchange rate also stabilising in recent months.

Consistently gloomy picture painted by certain groups was nothing but an undue criticism for a government which did a difficult surgery of the economy for the greater benefit of the masses. Remittances have touched new heights, CAD has improved drastically and exports have overtaken figures achieved under the last PML-N government.

Notably, former finance minister Miftah Ismail’s company has achieved record growth that exceeds 300 percent of what it achieved under his own government.

Opposition’s criticism for the sake of criticism is damaging its already dented credibility. Without much ado, its scepticism of the official economic figures is an own goal given that it doesn’t align with its political mantra of calling the PTI government ‘incompetent’.

All of this signifies the fact that the government has taken corrective measures. However, cautious optimism should be its official policy since the pandemic’s unpredictable nature is a cause of great concern in context of newer and deadlier variants. *