ISLAMABAD: The incumbent government is going to make history by presenting its sixth consecutive federal budget for the year 2018-19, with an estimated outlay of around Rs5 trillion, on Friday.
It will be a hallmark of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government to have presented six consecutive budgets during the five years of its democratic tenure from 2013-2018.
The National Assembly has been summoned to meet on Friday, at 4.30pm for the presentation of the federal budget, an official notification read.
The budget will focus on improving economic growth, maintaining fiscal discipline, reducing non-development expenditures and boosting exports besides providing relief to the masses, promoting investment for job creation and treading people friendly policies for overarching socio-economic prosperity.
The main focus in the budget would be on infrastructure and human resource development while the government is likely to enhance allocations for social safety net for providing maximum relief to the vulnerable segment of the society, the notification
It will also focus on social sector development and revenue enhancement measures, besides introducing reforms for improving governance and boosting the private sector
On the revenue side, the government would introduce measures for bringing improvement in tax collection, broadening the tax base, and facilitating taxpayers, official sources said and argued that strong revenue generation would play a crucial role in achieving targets for economic growth.
From growth perspective, the federal budget will focus on generating over 6 per cent gross domestic product growth (GDP), and for this purpose it will introduce some fiscal measures. The budget would be balanced, focusing on economic stability and growth, as the government had taken feedback from all the stakeholders for preparing this document, they added.
The document would reflect continuity of the government policies and no major change will be made.
Meanwhile, during the outgoing year (2017-18), the agriculture sector posted a growth of 3.81 per cent, the industrial sector grew by 5.8 per cent whereas exports also witnessed positive growth with inflation remaining a single digit. The overall GDP growth during the outgoing year is 5.8 per cent.
I have seen the press conference of Dr.Miftah Ismail and Ahsan Iqbal and surprised to note that sitting audience was completely unaware what he is talking about. In my opinion it is just a manipulation of figures which they were telling very confidently because they know that in general public no one is going to ask about past performance and there is no data available to confront with the stated facts and figured which are absolutely false and overstated.