Trade deficit shrunk by over 37% in March: Hammad Azhar

[IceCold]

ISLAMABAD: State Minister for Revenue Hammad Azhar has said trade deficit of the country has shrunk by more than 37 percent during the last month as compared to current period of March last year, ARY News reported on Wednesday.

The minister said in his tweet, “The Trade Deficit of Pakistan fell by more than 37% in March 2019 over the same month last year.”

The minister of State said economic stabilization policies of PTI government are bearing fruit.

Last month, Pakistan’s imports had seen a significant decline of 19 percent, to $4.5 billion in January 2019, according to figures released by the statistics department.

According to the department, Pakistan had imported items worth $5.57 billion in January 2018, while the amount of imports reduced to $2.04 billion in Jan 2019.

The significant decline in imports helped the trade deficit to shrink by 31.73 percent to $2.46 billion in January 2019 as compared with $3.6 billion in the same month of the last year.

While the exports grew by only 4 percent to $2.04 billion during the month under review as compared to $1.96 billion in January 2018.



https://arynews.tv/en/trade-deficit-37-march-hammad-azhar/

IMF does not agree with this.

 

[BHarwana]

IMF does not agree with this.

They do agree

 

[ziaulislam]

So is economy doing bad or good? Well slow growth is due to lesser imports and the further Pakistan reduces it's trade deficit the better true growth of Pakistan will happen. If Pakistan achieves 3.5% growth while reducing trade deficit further it will be a marvel of PTI.

simple, risk of pakistani economy is deficit, as economy was artificially boasted on deficits, economy should grow deficit free, deficit based economy can never work

1. Pakistan first has to control the current account deficit, as controlling that will decrease revenues and will cause the fiscal deficit to initially get worse
2. than under stabilization it should control fiscal deficit, the difference is IMF wanted both together and PTI wanted CAD first and than fiscal control, if we had gone to IMF than repeat of 1999 would have happened(zero development fund and all projects halted to decrease the fiscal deficit that would have been a problem due to high interest rate and devaluation)

why did this happens again and again simple

every government artificially decreases interest rates and over values the rupee to get ample funds to kick start govt led projects, this causes a ballooning deficit, low exports, CAD & this gets worse when savings goes down(due to low inflation)..you can artificially do that for 2-3 years but that bubble bursts soon after

PS:
GDP growth should be end result of right policies not achieved via deficts