KARACHI: Dr. Murtaza Syed, the acting governor of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), said in a podcast on Thursday that We are not Sri Lanka, and we do not share their economic situation. The country’s GDP growth rate has grown to 6% in the last two years, shocking the world.
“If you see our indicators, firstly our growth; after Covid-19 Pakistan is one of the best performing economies in the world. The covid19 shock only made our economy drop by 1%, while the rest of the world had a 5-6% decline,” the acting governor said.
On the current situation of the economy of Pakistan, Governor SBP in a podcast talked about the steps taken by the government of Imran Khan which saved the economy of the country. He also talked about the International Monetary Funds (IMF) program and thanked that we have it as they support the reforms of Pakistan, and the IMF does not want the situation of the economy to decline too much.
“Such an economy is a rarity for economics. It was an amazing shock for the rest of the world. We handled it in a great way, in the health sector, and also in the economic sector. Then, for the last two years, our growth rate has been almost 6%,” he added.
The SBP chief talked about the crisis in Sri Lanka and said, “The growth is going well, there is no Sri Lanka type situation here because their tourism venue was very low. 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. Stat bank was very stimulus, but the government was much targeted.”
He further adds, “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 Ahsas programs those people were facilitated.”
By comparing the GDP growth he added that in 2019 the public debt to GDP ratio was 77 percent, and today it is 71%., down by 6 percent.
“Lastly, the situation of our reserves today we have more than $10 billion. While, in 2019 we had only $7 billion, and the forward book that we borrowed from the bank was negative by 8 billion. When you differentiate the two we have minus 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,” Dr. Murtaza Syed said.
