Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader and Senator Raza Rabbani sharply criticized the budget presented by the government, saying that the government had mortgaged political and economic sovereignty to such an extent that the Financial Institutions (IMF) was so bold that it said that the defence budget in Pakistan should also be frozen.
He said there had never been such interference in the budget by the IMF that salaries and pensions were frozen at the behest of the International Monetary Fund.
Senator Raza Rabbani said that the current budget is nothing for the common man, the current budget is not even a budget but a deception that was put in front of us.
Earlier, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has urged Pakistan to freeze salaries of government employees and adhere to the fiscal consolidation path by showing a nominal primary deficit in the new budget – the two demands that Islamabad finds hard to digest.
The IMF is insisting that Pakistan should continue to follow the fiscal consolidation path due to a high and unsustainable public debt that is set to hit 90% of the total value of national economy.
The outbreak of the deadly novel coronavirus has exposed vulnerabilities of Pakistan’s economy that had already been struggling owing to weak economic foundations that caused fiscal and current account deficit crisis after every four to five years.
