KARACHI: The 101st meeting of the National Accounts Committee has projected the provisional growth of GDP for the year 2018-19 at 3.3%, Press Information Department (PID) reported.[the_ad id=”31605″]The growth of the agricultural, industrial and services sectors is 0.85%, 1.4% and 4.7% respectively. The crop sector faced the consequences of acute water shortages during the first half of the 2018 and thus only wheat depicted positive growth of 0.5% and cotton, rice and sugarcane witnessed negative growth at -17.5%, -3.3%, and -19.4%, respectively.
Other crops (such as onion, tomatoes and fruits) show growth of 1.95% mainly because of increase in production of pulses and oil seeds. Livestock sector registered a growth of 4% whereas forestry has grown at 6.5% due to increase in production of timber. The overall industrial sector on the other hand showed an increase of 1.4%.
The mining and quarrying sector declined by 1.96%. The large scale manufacturing (LSM) sector, which is driven primarily by QIM data (from July 2018 to February 2019), showed a contraction of 2.1%. Electricity and gas sub sector has grown by 40.5% mainly due to better performance of WAPDA & distribution companies and IPPs.
The construction activity has decreased by 7.6%. Services sector remained major contributor to economic growth as its value added increased by 4.7 percent. Within services sector, wholesale and retail trade sector grew by 3.1% whereas transport, storage and communication sector has registered a growth of 3.3%. Finance and insurance sector shows an overall increase of 5.1% on account of positive contributions from scheduled banks (5.3%), non-schedule banks (24.6%) and insurance activities (12.8%) despite decline in central banking by 12.5%.
The general government services has grown by 7.99% and other private services, a set of computer related activities, education, health & social work, NGOs etc. has contributed positively at 7.1%.