Pakistan can achieve 7-8% growth despite hurdles

What it has to do is to improve regional trade, governance.

KARACHI:

Despite enormous economic challenges, Pakistan can still achieve sustained economic growth of 7% to 8% in the next couple of years provided it starts giving importance to regional trade, especially with India and improve governance right from the start of next government, says a former top official of the World Bank.

“Improvement in regional trade, especially with India, will automatically increase GDP growth of Pakistan by 2%,” suggested Shahid Javed Burki, former vice president of World Bank. “But the most important thing the next government has to do is to improve governance to regain confidence of investors.”

He was speaking at the 13th MAP convention, organised by the Management Association of Pakistan under the theme of ‘Leadership, People, Innovation’ here on Tuesday.

Burki said sustained economic growth cannot be expected with the present level of bad governance, which is responsible for slow growth in recent years.



He cited the example of several countries, especially those in South America, which have started a crackdown on corruption and built anti-corruption mechanisms that has improved confidence of domestic and foreign investors in their economies.

“Unless we give importance to accountability, we will not be able to attract domestic and foreign investment necessary to take GDP growth from present 3-4% to 7-8%,” he added.

Unfortunately, Burki said, Pakistan is not using the services of 8 million overseas Pakistanis living in different parts of the world. But, again they will only engage with the government when they see better governance and accountability.

In her presentation on ‘Pakistan – Strategic Perspectives in the New Context and the New Challenges’, Senior Lecturer at University of London and Fellow Royal Society of Arts, UK Dr Marie Lall was of the view that unfortunately security issues, especially along the Pak-Afghan border, may continue to bleed Pakistan’s economy in the near future.



“After the withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan in 2014, Afghanistan will become a bigger challenge for Pakistan,” she said. “To avoid repercussions for its economy, Pakistan needs to cooperate with Afghanistan and India on economic issues and increase regional trade.”

Other speakers believed that energy shortages are expected to continue to hurt the economy before the country completes major gas pipeline projects like Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) and Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipelines.

They underlined the need for aggressive regional trade to counter the negative aspects of energy shortages and security issues that have been hurting the economy for the last couple of years.

SingTel Head of Living Analytics & Group Digital Life Mike Sherman said China and India are steering the world growth as well as consumption and the growth will only get faster because of their growing middle class and huge population.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2012.