Troubles lurking around every corner

Pakistan will head into 2023 with an incredibly gloomy economic outlook and troubles lurking around every corner. In the outgoing year, the people came around to an unprecedented price growth amid the country’s consistently deteriorating balance of payments crisis exacerbated by devastating summer floods and ongoing political uncertainty. Next year we could see inflation entrenched further and the economy trek toward a deeper recession as the politically embattled coalition led by the PML-N struggles to revive its sour relationship with the International Monetary Fund for the resumption of its loan programme to overcome its dollar liquidity crisis. Even though the finance minister, Ishaq Dar, continues to stave off International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressure to further tighten government spending, raise electricity and gas prices, and impose additional taxes to avoid the political fallout of such decisions, analysts believe that he does not have many options.