The government, on Monday, greenlit the acquisition of a hefty $500 million loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) aimed at fostering an ‘enabling environment to attract private investment’. This strategy, while addressing immediate fiscal requirements, is also driving Pakistan further into the debt trap. The Central Development Working Party (CDWP) endorsed the “concept proposal” for the $
Extending the overnight losses, the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) remained under selling pressure dragging the benchmark KSE 100-share index below the 67,000 level on Monday. Ahsan Mehanti of Arif Habib Corporation said a slowdown in GDP growth to 1pc in the second quarter of the current fiscal year compared to 2.2pc in the same period last year worried investors who resorted to taking profits
When tracing Pakistan’s progress, a predominantly agricultural country, we see that it transformed into a semi-industrialised economy, which then ushered in import-oriented and debt-driven growth with an increasingly vulnerable external sector. Stressing the need to accelerate export-led growth, Finance Minister Muhammed Aurangzeb said that import-led subsidised businesses were no longer sustai
Data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics on Monday showed that the consumer price index (CPI) for March was up 20.7 per cent from the same month last year, the lowest reading in nearly two years and below the finance ministry’s projections for the month. Compared with the previous month, inflation for March registered a 1.7pc rise. The economy has been beset by inflation above 20pc
As development spending continued to falter in the first eight months of the current fiscal year, successive governments kept doling out funds for the discretionary schemes of parliamentarians, according to official data. In the past eight months, parliamentarians consumed Rs38 billion out of the allocated Rs90bn in the budget for their schemes, as per the latest data on development expenditure