Despite the worst flood in the country‘s history and hundreds of billions of rupees in unbudgeted subsidies, Pakistan has initially projected only Rs990 billion fiscal slippages in this financial year, hardly showing a negative impact of Rs55 billion on its revenues.
Sources told that Pakistan has shared the revised budget framework with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) amid the global lender’s apprehensions about the reliability of these figures.
The disagreement over the impact of the floods on the fiscal framework remains a key hurdle in the next visit by the IMF Mission to Pakistan for negotiations for the release of a $1.2 billion loan tranche.
The sources said that the discussions would take place on these numbers with the IMF and the government was open to revise the figures based on the input by the global lender. They said the government had projected only Rs990 billion fiscal slippages — of which Rs850 billion was only on account of higher debt servicing cost.
