Small and Medium Enterprises ensure job creation in Pakistan

Listen! Ensure job creation Pakistan for your people to live a decent life, at least, if not to get rich. Just one decent job cannot be that difficult to manage. I am talking of at least ensuring job status in affirmative. I haven’t even started on Job satisfaction, stability, labor regulations, self actualization, innovation, skill development, new knowledge, new technology etc that are totally non existent in the private sector.

The real and sustainable job creators in today’s day,where organisations have become feather light, are Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that operate out of your homes. So, the new workplace is our couch. Pakistan already exports Freelancer services touching 0.5 million USD every year.

Prime Minister Imran Khan and his former deputy Asad Umar of PTI once revealed a SME expansion plan that would ensure job creation in Pakistan which said:

 

• 3 year tax holiday— to be increased to half the rate for the next two years
• Easy financing
• Support in skill training
• Special tax rates for engineering, agricultural, and garments value-added sector

A thorough survey of our existing SMEs — that are doing a wonderful job at import substitution and job creation — has revealed the following:

• All avoid coming into the tax net
• All point towards bureaucracy as the main hurdle in expansion
• Financing for expansion is too cumbersome to acquire
• Risk is too high in case the project fails
• The government institutions act as extortionists
• Finding talented manpower is impossible
• There is no legal protection in case of disputes
• There is no institutional corporate structure in the private sector as owners act as Seths’ and don’t accept any advice.
• There is no real incentive to expand once a nascent company gets a decent income.
• Only the military has somewhat better systems to provide steady projects to the private sector and that too purchase projects.
• Private companies avoid manufacturing and developing products for the market just to avoid the unnecessary hassle of paperwork and dealing with section officers in the ministries.

The following are the recommendations to boost the SME sector, which is the backbone of employment:

• Enforce the rule of law and make arbitration simple and cheap.
• Let undocumented money flow into the stock exchange to keep the revenues,
• payouts handsome and the Pakistani market attractive.
• Privatize some tax collection functions, especially toll, levy, surcharge, border imports, Value Added
• Digitize the economy like India and investigate every transaction beyond Rs 50,000
• Let the provinces collect their own taxes — the Federal government to handle GST, services, income, and tariffs.
• Heavily Spend on skill training at the schools — preferably freelance work online
• As President Reagan said, ‘less government is the only good government’. So, ruthlessly slash dead wood people and procedures that border on extortion and criminal neglect — and I mean at every institution.
• Privatize hulking giants like PIA, PAC Kamra, HIT, etc, to create a really valuable products that fetch big money and influence.
• Give financial protection from total ruin to SMEs from state coffers
• Muscle countries around us to open up their market for our mediocre SME products, so our SMEs evolve.
• Force the financial sector to introduce hedge funds and instruments to fund SMEs with promising innovations.
• Digitize the government sector; all procedures and rules have to be displayed online for all. Decision making to made IT platforms
• Our commercial councilors to facilitate difficult to import components for Value Addition inside the country.
• Make it simpler for SME owners to temporarily import super-skilled manpower and pay them in US Dollars
• Encourage Patenting, research publications by financial rewards and punish Intellectual Property infringements
• Enforce labor laws to protect vulnerable workers from blood-sucking bourgeois
• Hand over Mother Ship engineering complexes to wealth funds so that the hatch-lings in the private sector flourish under their wings.

The bottom line is ‘you can’t be for the big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be (considered working) for the little guy’

Are you listening to Prime minister Imran Khan’s job ensuring job creation in Pakistan requires political will to break out of the financial hold rich and influential people have over money and let institutions lend it out to talented individuals that don’t have the connections? After all, that’s what political parties are for.

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