Business

ISLAMABAD: The government’s battle against bloated trade deficit is finally bearing fruit as it shrank by 14 per cent to $23.45 billion in the first nine months of the current fiscal year from $27.29bn in the corresponding period last year. The decline in deficit — down $3.84bn in the July-March period — is estimated to be in the range of …

ISLAMABAD: The Governing Council of Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) on Monday approved the much-awaited new inflation rebasing mechanism for mapping the consumption of arrival of new products in urban and rural areas of the country. Currently, the PBS measures prices of 487 items collected from 76 markets in 40 cities across Pakistan, representing only the urban consumption basket at …

ISLAMABAD: Finance Minister Asad Umar on Monday announced the government’s strategy to deliver on Medium Term Economic Framework (MTEF 2019-2023) targets to be finalised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) later this month. Read: Editorial: Asad Umar must ensure that revenue measures don’t put brakes on economy The “economic growth rate would be the highest in 2023 compared to last 15 …

THE arrival of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission’s new chief for Pakistan Ernesto Ramirez Rigo in Islamabad on March 26 was preceded a day earlier by an official announcement of an inflow of $2.2 billion Chinese assistance for balance of payments support. As foreign exchange reserves rose to $17.58bn, Pakistani authorities said there was no immediate need for an …

Pinterest, among a gaggle of tech companies planning to go public this year, hopes to raise as much as $1.5 billion in its initial offering of shares. The digital scrapbooking site said in a regulatory filing on Monday that it will put about 75 million shares up for sale at a price between $15 and $17 each. That, at the …

Pakistan’s economic growth, after reaching an 11-year high of 5.8 per cent in FY18, is expected to see a decline over the next two years, the World Bank has predicted. GDP growth will decelerate to 3.4pc in fiscal year 2018-19 and further drop to 2.7pc in FY20 as fiscal and monetary policies are tightened to address macroeconomic imbalances, said the latest …

Finance Minister Asad Umar on Monday took a swipe at critics who accuse the government of having destabilised the economy with the weakening in the rupee-dollar exchange rate, saying the criticism was unfounded. “The exchange rate is not a measure of a strong economy. At one point, the Pakistani rupee was stronger than the Japanese yen, even though the latter’s …

The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) closed deep in the red on Monday, with the benchmark KSE-100 Shares Index shedding 600 points, down 1.6 per cent. The bearish trend dominated the market throughout the session as the benchmark index closed at 36,922 before hitting a day low at 36,738 points near the close of the day. The market’s opening at 37,552 …

The GDP growth in Pakistan is predicted to go down by 3.4 percent in the fiscal year 2019 and would lose pace further the following year by 2.7 percent owing to the constriction of fiscal and monetary policies to attend to macroeconomic imbalances, reported the World Bank. The World Bank in the latest edition of South Asia Economic Focus, Exports …

NEW YORK: US government officials plan to meet with executives from auto­makers and lithium miners in early May as part of a first-of-its-kind effort to launch a national electric vehicle supply chain strategy, according to three sources familiar with the matter. While Volkswagen AG, Tesla Inc and other electric-focused automakers and battery manufacturers are expanding in the US and investing …