The economic think tank 'Economic Policy and Business Development' (EPBD) has released a report highlighting the failure of the current trade policy and has recommended formulating trade policy at the district level, the 24NewsHD TV channel reported on Monday.
As per the report, Pakistan’s Strategic Trade Policy Frameworks (STPF) have repeatedly failed to meet their export targets, with the gap between targets and actual exports widening over successive policy cycles since 2009.
According to the report, the Strategic Trade Policy Framework for 2009–12 missed its export target by 4.45 percent.
Under the 2020–25 framework, the shortfall had increased to 43.68 percent, with exports recorded at US$32.1 billion against a target of US$57.03 billion.
The macroeconomic consequences are visible in external accounts. Exports stood at 10.4 percent of GDP in FY2025 — the lowest among regional comparators including India, Bangladesh and Vietnam — while imports rose to 17.21 percent.
The FY2025 deficit with Pakistan's twenty-five largest trading partners reached USD 40.5 billion.
Two structural problems underline the pattern. GDP growth has raised import demand faster than exports and consistently outpaced export capacity, turning each expansion into an external imbalance and sustaining the twin-deficit cycle.
Moreover, the high cost of production has primarily inhibited the country’s export performance.
Meanwhile, trade policy remains centralised even though the 18th Amendment devolved the delivery levers — industry, agriculture and skills — to the provinces.
Correcting this requires anchoring the next framework to a bottom-up, district-level strategy, restructuring institutions for effective trade governance, and tying annual targets to published reform milestones rather than reporting metrics alone.
Reporter: Waqas Azeem