How Pakistan missed $8bn FDI opportunity from China

New Delhi, May 8 Pakistan's Investment Minister Qaiser Ahmed Sheikh has admitted that the country has lost an opportunity to attract over $8bn in foreign direct investment, mostly from China, and generate half a million industrial jobs between 2018 and 2024, according to an article in the local media.

What the minister said is also an indictment of successive governments that have remained in power since the launch of the multi-billion-dollar CPEC initiative, the Dawn reported.

The gap between ambition and delivery is too wide to ignore. The fact that only four SEZs have moved beyond the planning stage in over a decade exposes the deeper failure of execution. This underperformance highlights policymakers’ persistent inability to treat industrialisation as a long-term national priority, the article lamented.

Since the launch of the CPEC, policymakers have repeatedly emphasised infrastructure and energy, but have always envisaged the transition to industrial development as the "second phase", which was neither prepared for nor planned. The result has been predictable: investor hesitation and missed opportunities. One of the stated aims of establishing these zones was to attract export-oriented foreign investment. The investors were expected to use Pakistan as a manufacturing base to export goods back to China and help bridge the widening trade imbalance, or to serve their existing markets elsewhere. Yet the few firms that did enter Pakistan largely did so to tap into its domestic market, rather than to establish export-oriented manufacturing bases, the article stated.

The article further noted that the minister is right to point to another opportunity for Pakistan. Rising costs in China and the ongoing rearrangement of global supply chains offer Pakistan a window, albeit narrow, to woo labour-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing. However, this opportunity will not materialise through declarations. Competing regional economies from Vietnam to Bangladesh have shown that success in industrial relocation depends on credible, predictable ecosystems, and not episodic policy attention, it pointed out.

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