IMF slashes Pakistan's growth outlook to 0.5%
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has lowered its forecast for Pakistan's economic growth rate from 2% to just 0.5% for the current fiscal year, amid high inflation and a growing unemployment rate in the cash-strapped country.
This showed an unambiguous deterioration of economic fundamentals over the previous 6 months since October when the Fund forecast the country’s gross domestic product to grow by 3.5% against 6pc for 2022 ago and inflation at 20 percent against 12.1 percent last year amid a slowdown in the global economy and devastating effects of floods.
Meanwhile, global headline inflation is set to fall from 8.7 percent in 2022 to 7% in 2023 on the back of lower commodity prices, but core inflation - excluding the volatile energy and food components - is likely to decline more slowly, the IMF said.
The revision in Pakistan's growth prospects is in line with similar 0.4% and 0.6% projected previous week by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, respectively. They also projected inflation at 29.5 percent and 27.5 percent, respectively, for the current year.
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