National News

ISLAMABAD, (APP): Pakistan has been beleaguered by
terrorism and security “challenges” but was still managing to
focus on growth and job-creation, Finance Minister Senator
Mohammad Ishaq Dar told CNBC international.
“Pakistan’s economy has shown great resilience against
the global trend of developing countries and the emerging
markets which have seen negative declines,” Muhammad Ishaq Dar
told the channel.
Ishaq Dar is currently leading a Pakistani delegation at
the annual meeting of Asian Development Bank (ADB) in
Frankfurth (Germany).
“We have shown seven-year high growth in the last fiscal
year and in the current year we hope to cross 5 percent. We
are aiming at a growth rate of 7 percent in the next two
fiscal years so things are moving quite nicely,” he said,
speaking on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the Asia
Development Bank in Frankfurt, the CNBC reported.
“But we had two serious challenges apart from macro-
economic stability which is now in order, one was security and
extremism and in June 2014, Pakistan took a bold decision to
have an all-out war against terrorism and it’s a fairly costly
item,” he said.
Dar told CNBC that his country faced enormous challenges
after the 2013 general election which was won by Nawaz Sharif
and his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party.
“The security challenges that Pakistan were facing at
the time of the last general election in 2013 were what I call
the three major ‘E’s’: Extremism, Economy and Energy,” he
said.
“We took all the three E’s on and we’ve had great
successes so far in the macro-economic stability side and we
are now working on the growth trajectory, job creation and
things are moving on fine and security is equally important
and so is the energy.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave Pakistan a
$6.6 billion loan in 2013 under a three-year program designed
to help stabilize the economy. It has, as of March this year,
received around $5.5 billion of that aid. Pakistan’s gross
domestic product (GDP) is expected to have grown 4.5 percent
this fiscal year, the IMF noted.
In March 2016 following a review of Pakistan’s economic
performance in light of the aid program, the IMF concluded
that the country was reaching fiscal targets and that economic
activity had “continued to gradually gain strength,” Mitsuhiro
Furusawa, the Fund’s deputy managing director said in the
report.
Furusawa added, however, that “building on these gains,
further progress, including in the area of structural reforms,
is needed to generate strong and inclusive growth and make the
economy more resilient and competitive.”