ISLAMABAD: Following the identification of major discrepancies in Pakistan’s import data ballooning up to $30-35 billion over seven years, the IMF has come up with a condition to assess the quality and authenticity of the country’s statistics.
In its latest staff report released after the approval of third tranche worth $1 billion under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF), the Fund dwelt upon the need for strengthening macroeconomic statistics.
The IMF states that after the identification of discrepancies in the source data used for merchandise imports as reported by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), which is not expected to significantly impact the Balance of Payment (BOP) statistics published by the SBP, a comprehensive analysis is needed of the impact on earlier published statistics and of procedures for data collection and aggregation under the IMF conditions.
Broader efforts to improve macroeconomic statistics are continuing, including the publication in July of the Agricultural Census (the first in 15 years), and release of results from the Labor Force Survey and Household Integrated Economic Survey (these two surveys were already released by the PBS) and ongoing work to implement the Government Financial Statistics roadmap and begin data collection for a new PPI index and three further major surveys in FY26.
The report illustrates that the Government of Pakistan is committed to improving the data following the identification of a discrepancy in the trade data published by the PBS for FY18-25.
It is committed to the IMF that the government will assess the quality of the import data and procedures for data collection and will prepare a full set of revised statistics and explanations for public dissemination after approval of the appropriate technical committee.
We continue to advance our efforts to improve the timeliness, quality and coverage of macroeconomic data. The three major surveys planned for FY25 have progressed well: the PBS published results of the Agricultural Census in August 2025, and will publish final reports (posted to the National Summary Data Page) on the Labor Force Survey and Household Integrated Economic Survey by end-December 2025.
The preparation of the initiation survey for the new PPI index is well underway, and collection of monthly price data is expected to commence before end-December 2025. Data collection for the three major FY26 surveys is scheduled to begin from January 2026: the census of manufacturing industries, the survey of small and household manufacturing industries, and the family budget survey. Consistent with the Government Finance Statistics (GFS) roadmap, the GFS central unit is meeting regularly to collect and classify fiscal operations data. The GFS mappings developed so far have been introduced into the SAP system, which will allow reports based on GFSM 2014 to be generated once ongoing system upgrades are completed, said the IMF report.
