Mahfooz Elahi, President of Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry said that Pakistan economy has been struggling in the year 2010 due to uncertain law and order situation, inconsistent policies, unstable political situation, unprecedented inflation, poor governance, stagnant privatization process and lack of public-private partnership, that  has badly affected the business activities in the country.

He while addressing a meeting of the representatives of industry and trade said that outage of gas and electricity, gradual increase in tariffs, manifold inflation, and non-utilization of huge available resources for power generation, uncontrolled law and order situation were the hallmarks of the outgoing year. No visible action was taken for the revival of economy that has resulted downward trends in foreign investments and decline in exports.
 
ICCI President said that in the last couple of years, electricity and gas tariff went up by 95 and 73 percent, which increased the cost of production many times. Industry suffered heavy losses because of regular and long hours scheduled and unscheduled load shedding of electricity and gas.

Elahi said that high markup rate of around 17.5 percent has discouraged investments, while in India and Bangladesh government maintained low markup rates of 11.5 and 12.5 percent respectively to encourage and accelerate the industrialization and investment process.

He criticized that high markup rate could not control inflation, which has gone up to more than 20%, whereas in neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka it remained in a single digit and in China it was only 4.9 percent.

He proposed that in coming year agriculture Income should be taxed to widen the tax base, small size dams and available energy resources must be exploited to plug in the gap between supply and demand of electricity and gas, markup rates should be brought down, infrastructure should be developed on modern lines for speedy transportation of goods, public-private integrated approach should be adopted for the formulation of practical and result-oriented and consistent policies and above all law and order situation must be improved to build the confidence of local and foreign investors.

President Mahfooz Elahi re-emphasized forming a National Think Tank with government-business participation to drive economy forward in 2011 by finding out suitable solutions of the problems to overcome the current economic crises. Private sector should be taken on board in all deliberations to chalk out consist and sustainable policies, also right and timely approach should be adopted to pull the economy out of deep troubles, he added.