PTI has damaged country's economy: Sherry Rehman

By Asim Yasin

ISLAMABAD: Parliamentary Leader of the Pakistan People’s Party in the Senate Senator Sherry Rehman has said Pakistan needs relief from ‘PTIMF’ which caused unprecedented damage to the country’s economy. “Pakistan’s economy is going through an unprecedented damage under Tabahi Sarkar’s controversial and non-transparent IMF agreement, which has wreaked havoc on the Pakistani street by unleashing a tsunami of unbearable utility and food staple price hike,” she said in a statement on Wednesday. Sherry said the indirect taxes from Rs1,000 to 1,300 billion will add to dangerous level of inequality. “It has also indebted Pakistan to the point of crisis, and has now taken us into a situation where the federal bank is being made totally unaccountable to the Pakistan’s parliament or people,” she said.

She said the PPP has always dealt with the IMF but in entirely different terms, where the market alone cannot ruthlessly determine prices, driving millions into poverty in the name of stabilisation goals. “We had also given the State Bank reasonable autonomy to make monetary policy, but never proposed opening up the country to the ups and downs of the international capital and its dictation,” she said.

Sherry said what we see today is a very worrying meltdown without any matching capacity for increasing direct taxation or actually widening the tax net. As a result, she said today we are totally exposed to debt, impoverishment and misgovernance on an epic scale. From Rs12.5 trillion, our total debt has reached Rs44 trillion (around 90pc of GDP), circular debt is expected to skyrocket to a whopping Rs4.6 trillion in 2023, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is down by 30pc and the World Bank estimates only 1.3pc GDP growth this year, which is the lowest in the region. “If this was happening in another country, the government would have resigned on their own,” she added.

Senator Sherry said the incompetent regime tax target for the next fiscal will shift the major tax burden directly on the vulnerable who are already struggling at the bottom of the social pyramid. Under the IMF deal, she said the FBR will increase indirect taxes by a massive Rs 1.272 trillion (almost 2.8pc of GDP) in the coming budget and the government will continue increasing petroleum levy on oil products to the maximum level (Rs30 per litre) this year and next year to collect about Rs510 billion this year instead of budgeted target of Rs450 billion, which will have downstream inflationary impacts on every item, including food staples.

She said the World Economic Outlook (WEO) 2021 report has projected unemployment rising by 0.5pc to 5pc during the current fiscal year. “This is the same government which promised 10 million jobs and five million homes. What happened to that? People are now struggling for their basic needs,” she said.