Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf spokesperson on Economy and Finance Muzammil Aslam shared a video clip from a podcast of the new governor of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Dr Murtaza Syed in which he acknowledged the economic achievements of the PTI government.
Dr Murtaza Syed said, “If you see our indicators, firstly our growth, after COVID-19, Pakistan is one of the best performing economies in the world.
The COVID-19 shock only made our economy drop by 1%, while the rest of the world had 5-6% decline. It was an amazing shock for the rest of the world.”
“We handled it in a great way; in the health sector and also on the economic sector. Then, for the last two years, our growth rate has been almost 6%, such a recovery is a rarity for economies. The growth is going well, there is no Sri Lanka type situation here, because their tourism revenues were very low.”
گورنر اسٹیٹ بینک پاکستان کی معاشی صورتحال پر روشنی دالتے ہوۓ اور کس طرح PTI حکومت نے باقی دنیا کے مقابلے میں قرض کم کیا۰ pic.twitter.com/vHsyxxEbMN
— Muzzammil Aslam (@MuzzammilAslam3) June 5, 2022
“Another indicator is public debt; in Sri Lanka or the rest of the world, it increased by a lot. In emerging markets, the average increase in public debt to GDP ratio is 10%, because the governments had to spend money. Pakistan did not do that,”
“Pakistan was very careful about its resources, state bank gave stimulus but the government was very targeted. They reallocated the expenditure and did not add any new expenditure. The focus was on the most vulnerable people and through Benazir Income Support and Ehsaas programs.”
“Lastly, the situation of our reserves. Today, we have more than almost $10 billion, while in 2019, we had only $7 billion and our forward book, that we have borrowed from the bank, that was negative by $8 billion. When you difference the two. We had $-1 billion in reserves. Now we have $10 billion in the book, our forward book is $-4 billion.”
“So we have almost $6 billion in reserves. So, judging on all three dimensions, we are doing much better than 2019. Very lastly, we are a part of an IMF program. When you are a part of an IMF program, IMF does not want your situation to decline too much. Thanks to Allah, we have that program and they are supporting our reforms.