Pakistan’s annual inflation, as measured by the weekly Sensitive Price Indicator, rose to 11.85% in the week ended October 22, even as the country’s two biggest multilateral lenders praised its economic stabilisation and urged it to move on to growth. The numbers capture a gap that is becoming hard to ignore: macroeconomic indicators are improving,...
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood on the trading floor of the London Stock Exchange this week and made a claim that Pakistani governments have made many times before, in one form or another: the economy is fixed, the hard part is over, and the numbers prove it. He became the first Pakistani premier to open...
The federal government collected Rs99 billion more than its budgeted petroleum levy target for the fiscal year ending June 2026, according to Finance Ministry data, a fiscal overperformance that arrives at a strikingly convenient moment, just as Pakistan opens formal negotiations with the International Monetary Fund on its next loan tranche. Official figures show the...
Pakistan and the International Monetary Fund formally opened negotiations in Islamabad this week for the fourth review of the country’s $7 billion Extended Fund Facility and the third review of its $1.4 billion Resilience and Sustainability Facility, with successful completion of both potentially unlocking around $1.2 billion in combined fresh financing. Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb...
An International Monetary Fund mission will arrive in Pakistan on September 23 to conduct a biannual review of the country’s economic performance under its $7 billion Extended Fund Facility and $1.4 billion Resilience and Sustainability Facility, marking the next major checkpoint in a lending programme that has become central to Pakistan’s fiscal management and, increasingly,...
A Senate committee sits down, does the arithmetic, and arrives at a number most governments would treat as urgent: four to five trillion rupees a year, sitting unclaimed, simply because the federal government still runs ministries the Constitution told it to hand over in 2010. That is not a rounding error. It is close to...