LAHORE: Pak-China Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCJCCI) President Shah Faisal Afridi has urged the government to provide jobs to 50 million youth of the country by encouraging rapid growth of the manufacturing sector, a statement said on Wednesday.
The economy should grow between three and eight percent annually to be able to employ the youth, joining the workforce and to ensure eight percent growth, while the investment rate should remain at 30 percent, he said.
Currently, the investment rate is around 19 percent only, he said, and proposed to review the Chinese roadmap to achieve the economic prosperity on fast track basis in the country, as China had attained the investment rat of up to 38 percent in record time.
Pakistan, Afridi said, could achieve similar success by introducing business-friendly policies coupled with lowest possible cost of doing business.
Pakistan’s economy is facing a multitude of problems, among which unemployment is the most alarming, as three million youth join workforce every year and only 900,000 managed to get jobs. “The government should be looking at symptoms carefully before going for the cure,” he said, adding, the business community should also be taken on aboard while revisiting the economic priorities.
The PCJCCI president also called for broader participation of the business community in the budget making process. The business community’s confidence in the budget making process is very low due to greater influence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other multilateral development banks in setting priorities for the federal budget, he said.
Referring to the services sector, Afridi deplored the services sector had been growing at a fast pace without a corresponding rise in the tax collection from this area.
The development of the services sector is beneficial to the economy only if it pays fair taxes; otherwise the sector creates a few jobs and has little impact on
the life of the common man, he added.
He emphasised to expand the ambit of the taxpayers rather than increasing the tax burden. Afridi regretted there were 400,000 industrial electricity connections in Pakistan, but only 46,800 were paying taxes to the government.
A corruption-free tax collection system is required to be in place to increase the number of taxpayers in real terms, he added.