Overseas Pakistanis to get top priority: Investment facilities
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, April 23: Steps are being taken to facilitate the rehabilitation and setting up of business enterprises for the overseas Pakistanis. Expatriates in the US are deeply hurt by the harsh actions of the American authorities and want to invest in Pakistan.
“All the four provincial governments are being asked to provide suitable lands for these returning Pakistanis for their housing, educational or health institutions,” Board of Investment (BoI) chairman Wasim Haqqie disclosed here on Wednesday at the inauguration of a two-day conference and exhibition on “SMEs — the Future of Pakistan”.
He said there were plans to construct houses, schools, colleges, hospitals, laboratories, diagnostic centres and a host of social infrastructure facilities for the expatriates returning from the US.
“It is a blessing in disguise,” Wasim Haqqie remarked while speaking at the conference being organized by the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority (Smeda) in collaboration with a private chartered accountants company.
All those who would return from the US are rich in experience, highly educated, have lot of money earned through hard labour in a very tough competitive environment and would be an asset for their homeland, he said.
Mr Haqqie said the government gave top priority to the domestic investors and overseas Pakistanis when it came to providing facilities for investment.
He estimated about one million Pakistanis in the US, of whom half-a-million are educated, well settled in different professions, jobs or business, and can bring substantial amount of investment to Pakistan if an enabling environment is created for them in their home country.
The BoI chairman spoke at length on the improvements made in various sectors of the economy, which according to him, had brought Pakistan to a comfortable position. He informed the participants that $660 million direct foreign investment has flown into Pakistan during the last nine months, and his expectation is that it would be close to one billion dollars by the end of June.
He said in Pakistan attention had remained focussed on the large scale industries, and small and medium enterprises received very scant attention. Unlike Pakistan, he said, SMEs were a critical part of the most economies in the Asia region. Countries like China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines have devoted a lot more attention for the development of SMEs where these enterprises constitute more than 90 per cent of the business share and engage more than 70 per cent of the workforce.
He compared it with Pakistan where four big automobile assemblers engage 2,500 employees, and about 450 to 500 vendors employ over 150,000 employees.
Earlier, Sohail Malik, a senior executive of the Habib Bank, in his address of welcome said SMEs were now receiving due attention from the banks, and substantial amount of credit assistance was being provided to the small business. The HBL is the lead sponsor of the two-day conference on the SMEs.
Later in the first working session on “SMEs and their roles in economic development”, Smeda chairman Iqbal Mustafa spoke on the issues.
On Thursday country representative of the Asian Development Bank in Pakistan, Marshuk Ali Shah, will be the main speaker on “SMEs growth and development”
