Government urged to take immediate steps to stabilise economy

Friday, June 12, 2009

LAHORE: The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) while expressing grave concern over sharp decline in manufacturing sector growth, has urged the government to take immediate and urgent measures to stabilise the economy.

The decline in manufacturing sector, particularly in the large scale manufacturing sector that has shown a negative 7.7 per cent growth was an eye opener and there was a dire need to identify the root cause of this meltdown, said LCCI President Mian Muzaffar Ali in a statement issued here on Thursday.

He said that the most worrying factor in the overall scenario is that the growth rate of 2 per cent was the lowest in the region: Bangladesh had a growth rate of 5 percent, India 4.5 percent and even Sri Lanka experienced a growth rate of 2.2 per cent.

The LCCI chief said that the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry had repeatedly pointed out that acute shortage of electricity, deteriorating law and order situation, and high mark-up rates were heavily denting the overall economic activity in the country and there was a dire need to take corrective measures. But the situation turned bad to worse for the want of any well-directed steps, he added.

He said that there was nothing wrong with the policies but the poor level of implementation deteriorated the industrial production. "Had a little attention been given towards the proper implementation of policies the situation would have not been so bad", he said adding that the performance of agriculture sector was, however, appreciable and needs to be maintained to wear off the negative impact of the industrial degradation.

Mian Muzaffar said that no one could challenge the multiplicity of factors that have negatively impacted on the manufacturing sector during the year. Major contributors to this decline were: automobile group (negative 39 per cent) followed by electrical (negative 31.3 percent), petroleum (negative 9.2 percent), food, beverage and tobacco (negative 10.5 percent), steel products (negative 5.62 percent), tyres and tubes (negative 4.0 percent) and textile (negative 0.73 percent).

The textile sector most affected by the global recession witnessed a decline of 7.6 percent in its export performance with cotton yarn's export performance declining by 15.5 percent, bed wear declining by 11.7 percent and readymade garments by 13.1 percent, he added.

Courtesy: BRecorder