PML-N may suggest trade with India

[ajtr]

PML-N may suggest trade with India​

By Muhammad Akram

LAHORE: The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz is likely to suggest that the Pakistan People’s Party-led coalition government broaden the scope of trade of daily use commodities with India through land routes as a first and vital step to curb high inflation in the country, PML-N sources told Daily Times on Monday.

The sources said that the Ishaq Dar-led PML-N committee, which will be meeting economic wizards of the coalition government today, besides other remedies, had a plan to discuss the matter in the presence of numerous economic brains of the country.

The sources said the PML-N wanted to realise a policy it shared with the PPP that good neighbourly relations with India with broader economic stakes were in the best interest of the country at a time when it was going through a severe economic crisis.

A source close to the PML-N team said that Pakistan had to open up trade routes with India if it wanted to help its ailing economy.

The source said Pakistan accounts for less than one percent of India’s trade and India less than five percent of Pakistan’s trade, while the economy of Pakistan was better off when 70 percent of its trade with India and more than 60 percent of India’s export went to Pakistan in the early 50s before the war, which subsequently resulted in tougher borders and shutting corridors of trade between the two countries.

The sources in the Finance Ministry said that although the matter of the imposition of the Reformed General Sales Tax had been deferred until a national consensus could be reached on the issue, yet the government was determined to push it again to seek the PML-N’s suggestions with the hope that the matter would not be put on the backburner again.

The source said the government has reversed a relatively minor reform of raising fuel prices to save its coalition government, though it was a decision to sustain the economic health of the government, yet politics on the issue made the government get down in its knees.

The sources said the government’s economic team had a lot to share with the PML-N team, including the fact that if political support was not offered to numerous corrective measures, the economy of the country was bound to come crashing down like a house of cards. The sources said Pakistan’s debt-to-GDP ratio was over 60 percent, while the tax-to-GDP ratio was below 10 percent, an alarming fact not only for international monetary institutions, on whose crutches the economy is standing at the moment, but also strange for the domestic economic wizards.



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