Textile Industry and Foreign Exchange Earnings.

Textile industry is Pakistan’s largest industry. It employees nearly 15 million people out of about 49 million workforce. Its share in GDP of the country is 8.5%. Majority of Pakistan’s exports are textile products and are exported to EU or USA. Pakistan’s share in international trade of textile is less than 1%.

Textile industry is a low tech industry. Companies involved in this sector do not pay much attention to research and development.

As a result of its being low tech., there is a strong competition among developing countries for the textile markets of the developed world. This makes these countries vulnerable to any fall in demand in the developed world. There are strong trends of deteriorating terms of trade against textile dependent nations. As these countries generally import machinery while export textile products.

The low ability of textile industry to earn foreign exchange leads them to have huge volumes of external debts. The instability of their currencies makes the situation worse by increasing the debt burden of these nations. As a result, balance of payment difficulties and huge fiscal deficit become a frequent problem for these nations.

The balance of payment and fiscal deficit problems leads them to borrow more from external donors. This borrowing hinders the economic growth of these countries as these loans have to be repaid. These underdeveloped countries have huge workforce which needs job opportunity. Lack of economic activity creates unrest among masses. This undermines the democratic process of these countries and military has to intervene from time to time. This happened in Pakistan, turkey, Bangladesh, Indonesia etc.