Keeping in view the momentum gained during past three years, the growth prospects for services sector are bright and it has been targeted to grow by 6.5 percent during the current fiscal year (2018-19).
Official data predicted that since retail and wholesale trade, and transport, storage, communication are closely associated with the commodity producing sectors of the economy, hence any uptick in the economic activity of agriculture and manufacturing would translate into increased growth in these sectors.
In this backdrop, wholesale and retail trade is targeted to grow at 7.8 percent, the data revealed.
Retail and wholesale trade, and transport, storage and communication have a share of 18.3 percent and 13.4 percent in total GDP respectively.
Meanwhile, Rapid pace of digitization of financial services is expected to substantially increase the number of people having bank accounts and help document the true potential of economy. Thus finance and insurance is expected to grow at 7.5 percent.
Tourism is another potential area for boosting growth in service sector and the World Travel and Tourism council had forecast that Pakistan has the potential to earn 3 percent of GDP from tourism.
There had been potential for increasing the broadband penetration and cellular density as the government was keen in technology upgrade, setting up IT parks and enhancing the capacity of IT and software industry.
The transport, storage and communication sector was set to grow at 4.9 percent while general government services, other private services, and housing services are expected to grow at 7.2 percent, 6.8 percent and 4 percent respectively.
Meanwhile, the export of services has witnessed negative trends during the last fiscal year (2017-18) as it went down 7.91 percent during the first eleven months.
The exports of services from the country during July-May (2017-18) were recorded at $4.696 billion against the exports of $5.099 billion during July-May (2016-17), showing decline of 7.91 percent.
The imports of services into the country, however increased by 4.98 percent by going up from $8.980 billion during FY2016-17 to $9.428 billion in FY2017-18.
Based on the figures, the services trade deficit during the period under review increased by 21.93 percent as it went up from the deficit of $3.881 billion in FY2016-17 to $4.732 billion during FY2017-18, the PBS data revealed.
(APP)
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