Federal Minster for Planning, Development and
Reforms said on Monday a holistic and integrated approach to productive
economic sectors and their predicaments was the government’s top
priority.

A stable macroeconomic environment
supplemented by important structural reforms should sustain economic
growth, which ultimately should be led by the private sector of
Pakistan, he said.

Ahsan Iqbal was speaking at a
seminar on Economic Policies for Inclusive and Sustainable Development
in South Asia, organized by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute
and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Pakistan.

Advisor
to the Prime Minister Sartaj Aziz, who also addressed the seminar,
expressed the need for fostering greater regional cooperation in South
Asia.

The reforms should focus on an integrated
energy reform, modernization of infrastructure, indigenous resource
mobilization, investments in human and social capital, and institutional
reforms for governance, he added.

The minister
expressed the government’s willingness to expand regional cooperation
with all the neighbouring economies, including China, India and
Afghanistan.

He observed that while structural
reforms were needed in the country’s domestic economy, there was also a
need for more open and inclusive policies so as to ensure sustained
growth.

Abid Suleri, Executive Director, SDPI
remarked that with the slowing down of economic growth in the Western
world as well as in China, the most important challenge for policy
makers in South Asia was to kick start a robust growth process and
sustain it in a manner that did not harm natural and human resources.

In
this regards, he said, it was very important that the political
leadership assumed a stronger coordination role. The complex political
economy required deeper coordination between sectoral policies such as
agriculture and industrial policies. These sectoral policies should then
be syncronized with inclusive macroeconomic policies including fiscal
and trade policies

Earlier during the day, Hafiz
Pasha, former Minister for Finance and Economic Affairs, expressed that
South Asian economies now faced an immediate need for increase in
regional trade, particularly in the context of declining export markets
in the global economy.

He was speaking at a meeting of experts on Economy of Tomorrow (EoT).

He
said that while the International Monetary Fund disbursed a huge amount
for the rescue of Greece, the multilateral agency allowed a much lesser
amount for Pakistan and that too with a number of stringent
conditionalities.

Briefing about the EoT
project, Philipp Kauppert, Resident Director of the FES, said that the
project seeks to focus on how an inclusive and sustainable model for
economic growth can be adopted and implemented as global economic
paradigms change.