It is rather boring to belong to a small minority, if not the only one, who reads the Economic Survey; you miss out on the debate. And while on the subject of debates, undoubtedly, if everyone agreed with everyone else, there can be no debate; disagreement excites debates, consequently firing up the thinking process thereby possibly providing a fresh prospective to age old challenges, and hopefully new solutions.
From my experience, stupid questions make you think the most.
But unfortunately, in today's polarised political environment, any kind of disagreement is viewed as a threat to be dealt with hostility; debate is the biggest casualty.
Nonetheless, let's keep doing our bit and continue with reading the Economic Survey.
According to the Economic Survey, the auto sector continues to stand out as one of the best performing, and is at the take off stage despite a transient deceleration in growth this year; however, currency devaluation has already made cars very expensive, perhaps cars are now out of reach of the middle class, the taxman also wants a bigger cut for taxes, the provinces want more for registering cars, and high interest rates will adversely affect appetite for mortgages.
Not sure how many cars the automobile sector can sell next year.
The Economic Survey states that the cement industry also showed poor performance during the first nine months of the current financial year, because of slow growth and low development spending; the development budget has been further reduced in the new budget, and hence the only hope for growth for the cement sector is linked to the low-cost housing scheme.
Not sure how much domestic cement is taken up by CPEC projects.
The only apparent hope for GDP next year appears to be general government spending and livestock; the followers of GDP need to go back to the drawing board.
If we really want real growth, the focus should be on indicators relating to the commodity sector and infrastructure; the only two things that really grew in the last decade were the number of motor vehicles on roads and number of mobile phones.
If you are wondering why there is more traffic, well a lot more cars on about the same kilometre roads.
Curiously cigarette production fell from 67.4 billion numbers in 2007-08 to 59.1 billion numbers in 2017-18; the Surgeon General should be very happy with that, since his campaign on printing warnings on cigarette packs has finally started working - or the tax collector should be very worried.
Total cropped area actually fell from 23.9 million hectares in 2007-08 to 22.6 million hectares in 2018-19; and to clear the eternal confusion, the only time we topped 14 million bales of cotton was way back in 2004-05; in 2018-19 we produced less than 10 million bales of cotton. Fruit production is also stagnant if not in decline for the last three years; perhaps a consequence of reduced availability of water.
This is particularly worrying since cotton remains the backbone of our exports and agriculture related goods constitute by and large the rest.
A funny bit relating to livestock - while because of some statistical calculation based on growth 12 years ago, the number of buffaloes, cattle, goat, sheep and poultry continue to increase annually; the population of camels, asses, horses and mules is however almost stagnant for the last decade.
Some however, remain sceptical about one species having remained constant all these years.
The Economic Survey is rather opaque about labour force and employment - there are no entries for the period 2015 to 2018; unemployment rate was 6% in 2013-14, fell to 5.9% in 2014-15 and further fell to 5.8% in 2018-19; the population grew from 188 million in 2013-14 to 212.8 million in 2018-19.
"Grew" perhaps is incorrect, since we recently found out after a census that there were around 30 million more Pakistanis; nonetheless we seem to be doing remarkably well as far as job creation is concerned.
Curiously, the numbers of bicycles, sewing machines and TV sets in use have fallen significantly over the last decade or so; perhaps why we are fatter and lazier as a nation today, and we are drinking a lot more beverages.
But even with a falling population of TV sets, the good news is that electronics, part of LSM grew by 23%.
There were only two new listed companies in the 10 months ended April 2019; reinforces personal view about the stock exchange not being a barometer of the real economy.
Looking at the statistical appendices in the inflation section was like time travel; somewhere in Pakistan you could in 2018-19 buy a Desi chicken for Rs 157/kg, onions for Rs 35/kg, tomato for Rs 67/kg; my better half wants me to report our markets vendor for corruption.
The statistical appendices relating to trade and payments and public debt have been deliberately excluded, not because they were not very interesting, but because enough has already been said about them.
The chapters on health and education are not very encouraging, and painful to discuss; these sectors require some serious doing.
There are many more interesting bits as you keep perusing the Economic Survey, the objective today, and last week, was only to just highlight some of these bits to provoke interest in those who matter; it would be best to identify the black swans hidden in the survey, before we are fooled by randomness (as coined by Nassim Nicholas Talib).
(The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad. Email: [email protected])
Comments
Comments are closed.