The Trade and Development Report (TDR) 2016

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Institute of Business Administration, Karachi organized a presentation by UNCTAD on ‘The Trade and Development Report (TDR) 2016’ at G&T Auditorium, Main Campus. This presentation was a part of the ongoing discussion on the global economic environment, the opportunities provided by CPEC to Pakistan to integrate into the world economy and the overall impact of global slowdown on the Pakistani economy.

Dr. Aadil Nakhoda, Assistant professor, Department of Economics IBA, organized this video conference session. The trade and development report-(TDR) 2016 discussed in the session focused mainly on Structural transformation for inclusive and sustained growth reviews, recent trends in the global economy and focused on the policies needed to foster structural transformation. The Dean and Director IBA, Dr Farrukh Iqbal also attended this session. The keynote speaker for the session was Dr. Padmashree Gehl Sampath, a well-known international expert on innovation, industrial policy and development issues, currently working at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva as part of the team on the Trade and Development Report, UNCTAD’s most important flagship report.

Main topics discussed in the session included commodity influence, globalization and convergence, convergence theory, implications to catch-up, industrial policy revived, manufacturing matter, and fallacies of export led industrialization, etc. It was observed that global economic growth remains weak, growing at a rate below 2.5 per cent, and global trade slowed down dramatically to around 1.5 per cent in 2015 and 2016, compared to 7 per cent before the crisis.

Student attendees raised some pertinent issues about Pakistan like “Manufacturing being the main force for growth in any economy” and “Why investments fail in Pakistan, when we are trying so hard and why do we rely mainly on agriculture?” This was addressed by the speaker and was suggested that Pakistan should apply better economic policies to attain industrial and investment opportunities.In this light, it is crucial to analyze the impact of the global slowdown on Pakistan. The exports of Pakistan have been declining for the past couple of years. Though, it is believed that CPEC may add impetus to economic growth as it involves infrastructure development, Pakistan needs to adopt stringent industrial and trade policies in order to benefit from the changing regional and global economic environment. Overall, the session was quite fruitful and informative, it shed light on how to achieve more success in terms of economics and structural transformation.

 
 

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