Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (ICCI) President Ahmed Hassan Moughal has commended China for giving assurance of doubling imports during the recent visit of Prime Minister Imran Khan to China.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Moughal termed it a positive development as it would help in reducing Pakistan’s trade imbalance with China and to improve the country’s dwindling forex reserves.

However, he said that the Pakistani leadership should have pressed with the Chinese leadership for enhanced market access to Pakistan on similar lines as China has given to Bangladesh and member countries of ASEAN.

The ICCI president said that this arrangement would have given significant boost to our exports to China. He said that China’s imports from Jan-July 2018 were over $1.22 trillion, which showed that it was a huge market for Pakistan and urged that Pakistani exporters should fully capitalize this huge potential for exports.

Moughal stressed upon the government to focus on expanding export-based infrastructure through policy measures in order to trigger the growth of exports. He said by focusing on export-based infrastructure, Vietnam had turned the East Asian Crisis of 1990s into an economic miracle.

He said the introduction of sound economic policies enabled Vietnam to increase its exports from single digit in 1995 to triple digits in 2017 in terms of billion dollars as Vietnam’s exports of goods had crossed $213 billion in 2017.

The ICCI President said that Pakistan was facing serious trade, current account and fiscal deficits and the best way to reduce these deficits on permanent basis was to create an enabling environment for exports.

He urged the government to take all possible measures for facilitating the local industry in enhancing exports.