Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: After failing to achieve almost all financial targets in the current fiscal year, the federal government will present the Economic Survey for FY 2015-16 tomorrow (Thursday).

The incumbent PML-N government was struggling to achieve several economic targets in the third consecutive year.

Documents available with Daily Times show that the government has once again failed to achieve key economic targets. Agriculture growth stood at 0.19 per cent in the current year. This is the lowest agriculture growth in the last 25 years. The government set the agriculture growth target at 3.9 percent, but 44 percent decrease in cotton production and 6.8 million ton decrease in rice and maize production brought the agriculture growth rate down to 0.9 percent.

It is worth mentioning here that cotton production decreased to 10 million bales this year from 14 million bales last year.

The government set $ 25 billion export target, but failed to achieve it. According to the data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, with 12.99 per cent decline in exports in 10 months of the ongoing fiscal year, the volume of exports remained at $19 billion.

The same is the case with the foreign direct investment (FDI). The government set the FDI growth target of 17.7 percent, but the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics said it would not go beyond 15.5 percent this financial year.

The government set the revenue collection target of Rs 3,104 billion for the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR). However, by May 15, an amount of Rs 2,240 billion had been collected. It will be a miracle to achieve the remaining target of tax collection i.e. Rs 664 billion in less than two months.

The government projected the GDP to grow up to 5.5 per cent this year, but the PBS data showed that it would stay at 4.7 per cent.

The finance minister said in his budget speech of 2013-14 that the government would take the GDP growth rate to seven percent. The government has failed to achieve this target and the current GDP growth rate is approximately 4.7 percent. Now the government has decided to set the GDP growth rate target at 5.7 per cent.

On the other hand, the industrial development ratio has improved from 6.4 percent to 6.8 percent. The services sector growth rate has increased to 5.7 percent.

Pakistan imported two-and-a-half million cotton bales this year. Large-scale manufacturing witnessed 4.61 percent growth this year.It is an old tradition that Economic Survey is presented a day before the federal budget.