New Delhi, Jan 15 (IANS) Pakistan’s current state of affairs cannot drive the 250 million-strong population towards sustained progress due to cross-cutting constraints affecting all 20 priority export products and six export drivers, a media report has stressed, highlighting that blaming the IMF will not do any good for the country, which is massively suffering across economic parameters.

A panel constituted by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif reached this conclusion after discussions with industry stakeholders, according to a Dawn report. The panel was formed to formulate a strategy to exit the IMF programme once the current bailout facility ends at the end of next year.

The report stated that the panel’s “implicitly holding restrictive IMF financing responsible for the government’s failure to aggressively implement reforms to return the economy to a sustainable growth path is an attempt to gloss over the state’s own dereliction of duty”.

Moreover, the constraints to economic and export growth — high, volatile energy costs, policy unpredictability, distorted taxation, logistics and trade facilitation bottlenecks, institutional fragmentation, regulatory burden, etc — cited by the panel are old hat.

“These have featured in donor and government reports and in media commentary,” the report mentioned.

The IMF encourages the government to create a conducive business clime.

On the other hand, “the authorities are blaming the IMF programme for a sluggish, moribund economy to cover up their own incompetence, and obscure the ruling party’s unwillingness to dismantle the entrenched politically protected rent-seeking structures”, the report revealed.

Another recent report in Dawn said that the IMF’s orthodoxy is set to consign Pakistan to a low-growth trap for years, and without a fundamental rethink of the current strategy, and a change in the sham nature of the fiscal austerity being imposed, the economy will continue to be impaired for the long term, while ordinary Pakistanis will continue to suffer needlessly.

Since 2022, the installed government has imposed, under the watch of the IMF, “a crushing burden on ordinary Pakistanis via austerity policy”.

“A large fiscal adjustment has been carved out through massive taxation and cuts in subsidies instead of any hint of restraint in spending by the government either on itself or on its constituents and backers,” the report lamented.

–IANS

na/vd