The National Assembly Standing Committee on Commerce has expressed serious concern over Pakistan’s persistent trade deficit with China and other free trade agreement partners, and called for a comprehensive assessment of the factors behind the imbalance (Dawn).
The session at Parliament House, chaired by MNA Muhammad Jawed Hanif, reviewed tariff reforms, export promotion measures, the performance of trade-related bodies, relations with major trading partners and proposed legislative amendments.
The numbers explain the alarm. In the first half of fiscal year 2025-26, imports from China grew 25.61 per cent to $9.472 billion while exports to China fell 5.59 per cent to $1.216 billion — a ratio of roughly eight to one, moving in the wrong direction on both sides simultaneously.
That is the uncomfortable arithmetic of the free trade agreement. Tariff concessions were expected to work in both directions; in practice they have widened access to the Pakistani market far faster than they have opened the Chinese one to Pakistani goods, which remain concentrated in a narrow band of low-value categories.
The committee directed the Ministry of Commerce to provide detailed presentations and comprehensive reports on the Export Development Fund, GSP+, the trade deficit with China, Malaysia and Indonesia, and mineral exports.
The wider trade position is deteriorating as well. The overall trade deficit widened by 25.17 per cent to $3.9 billion in July.
That figure sits alongside the other number reported this week: remittances of $3.6 billion in the same month, up 13 per cent. The two are close to cancelling each other out — which is, in effect, the current external strategy. Labour exported abroad is covering goods imported from abroad, and the committee’s demand for an assessment is a request to know why the second half of that equation is not being addressed.
