The digital economy in Pakistan has the potential to boost the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) up to $40 billion besides consolidating the local economy, says an official from the Ministry of Commerce.
Through the evolution of a digital economy, Pakistan can rapidly achieve its economic agenda in all major sectors including trade, E-commerce, education and health for economic growth in the country, said the official.
Pakistan needs to work extensively in the digital economy as the country has a sizeable share in the global mobile market, with over 160 million mobile phone subscribers and around 150 million internet users, he said.
He added,
We can improve public services in different sectors through the modern digital tools for providing rapid services to the people.
He said that Pakistan is an agricultural country and through the digital mechanisms, the farmers and agriculture workers can improve their financial mechanism to connect with the global value chain.
Replying to a question, he said that a digital data integration system will play an important role to improve the economic mechanism in all major sectors of the country. He stated that it is also important for bridging the gap in the economic and trade data process through the integration of various data mechanisms to reflect the true picture of the economy including trade, industries, services, and agriculture sector.
Trade Data Mechanism
He said,
To evolve the proper trade data mechanism and to resolve the issues in trade data, the government intends to include Export Processing Zones (EPZs) in its trade data collection system, which was not currently taken into account by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) and the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).
The official pointed out that exclusion of exports routed through the EPZs by the two organizations resulted in a difference of $1.2 billion between the reported exports and the actual export numbers.
The official said the federal cabinet has already approved an e-commerce policy for promoting the digital culture and paperless trade to help enhance the trade volume.
He added that it is the government’s priority to evolve the integrated trade data system and streamline the affairs by the end of October. All the systems will be linked to the Ministry of Commerce, which will be under the control of SBP.
Trade data of EPZ is already included in country’s data
Pakistan is currently one of the top-5 growth markets for the connectivity industry. Currently, many entrepreneurial businesses in Pakistan are providing solutions for many problems via digital innovations which in turn is helping to accelerate the growth of economy.
While this gov. likes to talk about the digital economy all the time, they fail to point out the steps they have taken to achieve this. The internet is being taxed at 32% and wasn’t this gov. planning on taxing it more. The taxes on mobile phones too are ludicrous.