LAHORE   -   Pakistan is blessed with huge potentials to flood the world markets with its goods and fetch bil­lions of dollars in return. Pakistan needs an ur­gent economic growth plan to offset the impact of debt servicing, which consumes half of the national fiscal budget annually. SAARC Cham­ber of Commerce and Industry’s former Presi­dent Iftikhar Ali Malik expressed these views in a meeting with former ambassador and founder Secretary General of SAARC Chamber, Rehmat Ullah Javed, here Sunday.

He said the government should formulate economic policies with the sole objective to facilitate the private sector, which is the en­gine of growth and successive governments should carry on the same policy to retain the private sector’s confidence, besides helping a stable exchange rate for investments and the governments should remove all taxes from the exports sector, promote digital economy and step up for the research and development in all fields. He said that exporters facilitation centres under one-window, simplifying cum­bersome procedures, ending of bureaucratic and other hurdles, ensuring the allocations of sufficient energy supplies to the exports man­ufacturing units and initiation of the techni­cal, vocational education in the country, are key factors achieving economic growth.

Iftikhar Ali Malik also asked the private sector to stop going for tax concessions and subsides, start training its workforce, ap­point labourers on a permanent basis and not on contract or daily wagers to give them a sense of job protections. He also urged the private sector to stop looking to the EU for GSP plus facility or the US markets for its ex­ports, rather shift its focus to the Asian na­tion like China, Japan etc, for huge returns. One percent exports to China will fetch $24 billions, he cited. He said Pakistan also needs to promote its economic diplomacy and align its public and private sectors to boost years long stagnant exports. He said the country lacked a coherent strategy for economic diplomacy, which resulted in low exports and a fragile economy. He said close coordination among ministries also help a lot to chalk out results oriented sustainable plans as to how national exports can grow on the global markets— as the economic diplo­macy widely stands contended. He said the country throughout its history stuck to un­derpin its economy with the security servic­es for which it has been part of SEATO, SAN­TO, etc. Rehmat Ullah Javed said that there is also a need for defining the objectives for augmenting the country’s economy without debts acquisitions, and recommended that the government should appoint profession­als from the private sector as economic dip­lomats, instead of its own officials.