Sustaining Trade and the Balance of Payments i) The Commerce Ministry and the Pakistan Trade Development Authority should identify the principal constraints to the growth in emerging and nascent exports, in collabo­ration with an international Multilateral agency like the World Bank. The steps and projects necessary for removing the constraints should be identified and implemented on a priority basis. ii) The ten emerging or nascent manufactured goods identified in Table 15.11 should be declared as zero-rated industries and not subject to domestic sales tax. iii) All SMEs in both the agricultural and manufactured goods categories should enjoy the benefit of special access to commercial bank loans with a special tax credit facility for the banks. 15.6 Under Development of Service Exports Pakistan has largely failed to exploit the potential for service exports. As shown in Table 15.12, these exports aggregate to only$7 billion, and have shown a modest growth rate of only 4 percent since 2015-16. Fortunately, starting from a low base, telecom and information services have shown rapid growth rate of 20 percent and have now emerged as the largest service export at$2.6 billion. However, this still stands in sharp contrast to high level of IT exports of India of$120 billion. Table 15.12: Trend in Export of Services 2015-16 TOTAL SERVICES EXPORT 5455 Transport 1125 Travel 323 Financial Services 110 Telecom& Information Services 788 Other Business Services 1009 Government Services 1946 Others 154 Source: SBP 2021-22 6957 807 541 112 2165 1644 1071 167 ($ million) ACGR(%) 4.0 -5.5 8.6 0.0 20.0 8.1 -10.0 1.3 The Ministry of Information Technology may be given special development funds to expand the capacity for basic and advanced training to undergraduate students in engineering universities and business schools in IT. Also, efforts must be made to bring the export earnings from IT into formal channels. 153