Weekly Economic Roundup

September 15, 2019 (MLN): The country’s financial profile was brought into clearer picture with the following data releases over the course of the week:

• The Weekly Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) for the Combined Group decreased by 0.24% during the week ended Sep 05, 2019 while the SPI increased by 16.55% compared to the corresponding period from last year.
• The total debt of the Pakistan government increased to Rs.33.023 trillion in July 2019, showing an increase of 3.89 percent over June 2019.
• The federal government has so far released Rs 69.8 billion for various ongoing and new social sector uplift projects under its Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) 2019-20, as against the total allocation of Rs 701 billion.
• The government has released a sum of Rs 139.762 million for various power projects under annual Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) for fiscal year 2019-20 so far.
• Pakistan's Forex Reserves increased by USD 132.20 Million or 0.85% and the total liquid foreign reserves held by the country stood at USD 15,751.70 Million on Sep 06, 2019.
• Overseas Pakistani workers remitted US$ 1,690.9 million in the August 2019 as compared with US$ 2039.3 million received during July 2019. This showed a decline of US$ of 348.4 million on month-on-month basis, reflecting the usual one-off post Eid-ul-Azha effect.
• Impact of economic contraction was visible in the cement sector; as the first two months of this fiscal saw domestic demand declining by 5.49 percent while exports posted a healthy increase of 12.66 percent.
• Production and sale of passenger cars in the last two months, draw a striking contrast against the figures recorded in the same period last year when over 39,350 cars were produced, and 34,260 units were sold. This year, a production of 27,108 units and a sale of 20,094 units has been recorded.

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