ISLAMABAD, June 10: The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz has questioned the constitutionality of the budget for 2007-08 which has been presented in the National Assembly before finalising the National Finance Commission (NFC) award.
“This is a gross violation of Article 160 of the Constitution,” said leader of the PML-N in the Senate and former finance minister Ishaq Dar while addressing a press conference with central information secretary Ahsan Iqbal and PML-N Punjab leader Iftikhar Awan here on Sunday.
He said budgets presented since 2002-03 were in gross violation of Article 160 of the Constitution. The NFC awards were finalised by the PML-N governments in 1992 and 1997. He lamented that the present regime had failed to finalise the NFC award that was due in 2002.
He challenged the growth figures mentioned in the budget documents and rejected them as misleading. Mr Dar said it has been claimed in the Economic Survey 2006-07 that the country’s growth performance over the last five years has been striking as Pakistan's real GDP has grown at an average of 7 per cent per annum during these years.
He said last year’s Economic Survey confirmed that the base for the national accounts was changed from 1980-81 to 1999-2000 without making corresponding changes in the previous annual accounts.
The size of the GDP has become larger after rebasing the national accounts. He said on the contrary, Pakistan's per capita GDP growth has been one of the lowest in South Asia and below the average of all low-income countries during 1999-2005, when measured in purchasing power parity terms as per the data contained in the World Bank's Development Indicators released on April 15, 2007.
He said a widely recognized indicator of the level of prosperity was gross domestic product (GDP) if measured on purchasing power parity basis.
