Finance Minister Ishaq Dar will unveil the federal budget in parliament on Friday, in the absence of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is recovering from open-heart surgery in London.
The Economic Survey for 2015-16 will incorporate poverty level at 29 percent population in accordance with recently adopted new methodology by Pakistan, after the consultation and validation from the World Bank.
According to media reports, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said the negative growth of 0.9 percent in agriculture sector against target of 3.9 percent not only caused a major hit to the growth target for the current fiscal year by 0.5 percent and forced the growth to reduce the projection for the next fiscal year from 6.2 percent to 5.7 percent.
The minister said that it would be challenging for the government to take steps for promoting growth for agriculture sector as the government would announce special package for this sector in next budget.
Another priority, he said would be current account deficit, which has so far been contained owing to low oil prices and inflows of remittances. We need to increase exports and revival of agriculture to help increase exports, he added.
Coming to the positives, the public sector investment has gone up from 3.7 percent of GDP in 2014-15 to 3.8 percent of GDP in the current financial year.
Pakistan’s per capita income has gone up to $1561 in financial year 2015-16 against $1517 per person last year, an increase of $44.
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