 Welcome back to corporate governance and today we are going to talk about a very important component of the economic policy. We talked about monetary policy which actually has an overarching role and the second one is the fiscal policy. So, today we are going to see what are the different elements and important ingredients of the fiscal policy. Most of the time we hear about the monetary policy because what happens is that it has a direct influence on the common man. It directly influences everyone, poor, rich, industrialist, students, educationists, any sector of society. The fiscal policy also has its own implications. It does have an effect on all of us. However, it tends to be a little bit more overarching. It tends to have a more strategic role. We see that after the Great Depression of the 1930s, the importance of the fiscal policy basically emerged according to Kaini's influence. And now what we see is that the world realized that if we do not want to have a repeat of the Great Depression, then having positive, constructive, engaging and well thought out fiscal policies are extremely important at the national, regional and global level. And therefore it became mandatory for governments to have very coherent and very well thought out strategic fiscal policies. Now what we see is that these fiscal policies have an influence on changes in government expenditure. And another very important element is that it affects the revenue programs that aim at the different levels of engagement. And also what we see is that the economic stability also emerges from it. And therefore all of this tends to constitute the fiscal policy. Now what we see is that the government has many heads of expenditure and the major ones are definitely its own expenses, its admin expenses, its pay structures, its balance of payments. Its return of loans, its interest payments and all of these different areas which are basically called non-development expenses. Then we have the development expenses which are taking place and these development expenses again are different development programs which we see where we see construction of roads, where we see construction of dams, whereby we see that different facilities are being provided to the common man where different institutions are being developed. So all of that becomes a part of their development program and then the non-development budget. So all of this together tends to mesh up into the fiscal policy and again to ensure that there is a proper balance in how all of this is done. What we have seen in the past 20 years is that there has been an explosion of expenses which have taken place, which have basically resulted in us taking a huge and massive of loans from the international community and the IFIs and that has contributed towards great pressure on our return of payments and also on payment of interest. So what we see is that we are now in a whirlpool whereby we are just moving around and changing our gaps and trying to ensure that balance through fiscal policies and another thing that has emerged is that it is very unfortunate that wrong fiscal policies or incoherent fiscal policies or discontinuing fiscal policies has led to the fact that our governments have become postage to international players like IMF or the World Bank or other IFIs and that again is a very, very dangerous situation which has emerged. So therefore the fiscal policy has a very, very important impact on a more strategic context of how governments and nations are moving forward. Ladies and gentlemen when we are talking about the government expenditure programs then we have to see that is it expansionary in effect or is it contractionary and again how does it become contractionary when there are a lot of taxes and we see that taxes can be direct or indirect and again I will talk about it as you move a little bit forward that how direct taxes have an impact on our lives and what we see is that the expenditure program of any country is expansionary in context whereby job opportunities are being created whereby money is given into circulation and things like that and with more taxes then definitely the economy tends to constrict because then everyone comes into the ambit of taxation be it direct or be it indirect. Now ladies and gentlemen the attainment of full employment is also regarded as a primary objective of fiscal policy so just like the economic policy, the monetary policy, the fiscal policy also looks at full employment because if there is full employment then what happens is that we would have a better stability within the country there would be a lesser gap between the rich and poor. And another thing that we are looking at is that the stability of the general context of the economy that is also a very very important thing when we talk about stability of general price levels and that again is to control the inflationary context which is taking place within the economy and right now for example we are seeing at a global level due to post-COVID this has a upward trend and is causing havoc and problems in nearly every country around the world especially what we see is the price of petrol going up so high and with the price of petrol going up then everything is affected directly or indirectly. In Pakistan we see that the tax regimen is more indirect everything is taxed I mean from food to medicine to clothes to anything that is there it is taxed and then there are multiple taxes I was just going through the different taxes and I saw that we have about 37 indirect taxes which are here I mean it is a long long list and then we have direct taxation also we are talking about improving that base unfortunately again indirect taxation either it is the exporters who are directly taxed or it is the salary class and that is also very bad because we have a very small tax base and that tax base has to increase so that the government can get more revenue and the pressure is released from the salary class or from the exporters because what we see is that the gray market or the black market exists more in Pakistan rather than the white market there is great need that through proper fiscal policies the black market and the gray markets are controlled and the white market is brought up so that they can be more balanced between the different stakeholders and there are more opportunities created for the citizens at large because without that they would always be pressure on both internally and externally and that is being seen as very evident how things have swirled out of control and right now we see that we are in this high inflationary context and we really have to emerge out of that so that tends to affect growth rate also definitely we need to through fiscal policy improve the levels of education technical and organizational skills and higher rate of capital accumulation in the context of growth with equity resource mobilization and income redistribution to reduce income inequalities is also a very important aspect of the fiscal policy and we have to see that all of this is done through a better inclusive and participatory approach and the different players of fiscal policy do not succumb to personal motivation but they have to look at national motivation national integration and the fact that a more equitable equitable context tends to emerge within the nation and there is a benefit for all and it is very important to control expenses and also to reduce the indirect taxes and maybe to improve the increase the direct taxes and increase the tax base so that there is a better cash flow within the government and we can reach out to our balance of payments in a better way and we do not have a default situation like that which is awkward in Sri Lanka and that would basically be through a proper holistic participatory inclusive fiscal policy so what we basically see is that income redistribution to reduce income equalities is also a very important byproduct of fiscal policy but through fiscal policy it is very important that we achieve full employment we also ensure that there is lesser indirect taxes improve our tax base in a better way we ensure that there is a control of government expenditure and also the fact that we are able to negotiate with different different finance providers in a better way and that we can attain a higher level of giving back on our debt and the loans that we have taken previously and we tend to minimize the loans in the future and we tend to take them with a better package with better interest rates which would then have an overall impact on the betterment of the common man on the economy and also on the inflationary trends which tend to exist and the overall financial stability of Pakistan. Thank you so much.