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Thursday March 28, 2024

Industrial growth rose to 8pc in November

By Mehtab Haider
January 19, 2017

ISLAMABAD: The timely kicking off the crushing season of sugarcane by mills in Punjab and Sindh this year has pushed up industrial growth up to 8 percent in November 2016 with major contribution from sugar production as growth of sweetener commodity registered a phenomenal Large Scale Manufacturing (LSM) growth of 2,480 percent.

According to official data released by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) showed that the sugar production went up to 210,278 metric tons in July-Nov period of fiscal year 2016-17 against 8,148 metric tons in the same period of the last financial, registering a growth of 2480.73 percent.

Overall, the LSM registered growth of 3.24 percent in first five months of the current fiscal year. If the growth in sugar production is excluded from the overall growth of 3.24 percent in first five months, it will fall down to around 2.6 percent so this phenomenal growth has set the stage for achieving higher growth trajectory during the current fiscal year.

Pakistan is eyeing to achieve GDP growth in the range of 5.5 percent during the current fiscal year against 4.7 percent last year. The agriculture sector had to face major blow in the last financial year but now the government was expecting that the production of major agriculture crops will rebound pushing up growth trajectory in the range of over 5 percent. The World Bank and other multilateral donors have recently revised upward their projection for GDP growth with expectation of crossing 5 percent growth mark by end June 2017.

“There are major contributors in higher LSM growth including sugar, cement production, automobiles and electronics goods as these sectors played a major role for pushing up the LSM growth up to 8 percent,” official sources told The News here on Wednesday.

In food and beverages sector, after achieving impressive growth by sector, the beverages and tea blended registered growth of 19.42 percent and 7.69 percent respectively. In pharmaceutical sector, the injections and ointments achieved growth of 13.78 percent and 12.87 percent.

The major contributors into chemical sector are soap and detergents as it achieved growth of 14.18 percent and synthetic fiber 15.47 percent. The cement production registered a growth of 10 percent.

In automobile sector, the motorcycles production achieved growth of 17.97 percent, tractors 37.86 percent, trucks 66.37 percent and buses 32.47 percent. Interestingly, the production of electronic goods achieved massive growth despite this fact that these products are mainly used in summer season but the PBS data showed that refrigerator production achieved growth of 21.86 percent, deep freezer 50 percent, electric fans 37 percent and electric bulbs 32.82 percent.

The renowned economist Dr Ashfaque H Khan has expressed his doubts about authenticity of the data released by the PBS and said that exactly the government was following the pattern of managing the data from November as they did the same thing in last year. “All efforts are underway to achieve GDP growth in the range of 5.5 percent for FY 2016-17 and this practice will be continued for coming few months,” he added.

He wondered that electronic goods which were being used in summer season were achieving impressive growth in November 2016 and release of such data raised eyebrows of independent economists.