Economic experts and academics have criticised both the government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for what they called “the manipulation of fiscal data” and misaligned economic priorities.They demanded of the government that the budget for the coming fiscal year 2016-17 should be based on long-term economic priorities of the nation, with human development and wellbeing as the main focus. The budget entails the overall policy direction and should not be taken merely as a sheet-balancing or accounting exercise, they said.The speakers, however, also hailed the strength and economic robustness of the Pakistani nation, which has continued to thrive due to its rural and informal economy and also the billions of dollars of remittances sent by expatriates.“Mere balancing of payments was by no means the objective of economic planning and policy making,” Dr Ashfaque Hassan Khan, Dean, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, National University of Science and Technology (NUST) said in his keynote address at a pre-budget seminar held at the Institute of Policy Studies here on Thursday.Khan, who was a former economic adviser to the federal government, alleged that the IMF has turned a blind eye on the economic failures of the present government.Heavily criticising the macro-economic policies of the government, especially its austerity measures and spending priorities, Khan claimed that the country will be faced with a deadly debt trap by 2018-19 as a result of the measures taken by the financial managers of the present government. Had the international oil prices not gone down since June 2014, the government would have had added at least $8 billion debt on the country by now, he added.He was of the view that the actual GDP growth falls hardly in the vicinity of 3-3.7%, contrary to the government’s claims of heading towards a growth rate of around 6%, which according to him were based on distorted facts and manipulated data.Khan also projected that actual fiscal deficit would amount to over 8% of GDP and the government’s economic managers were trying to arrive at facts agreed - after several revisions - with the IMF by playing with the actual economic indicators. He added that a mammoth amount of Rs178 billion was being accounted for as “statistical discrepancy.”Fasihuddin, former chief economist of Planning Commission of Pakistan, chaired the event. In his concluding remarks, while noting that the economic performance in the outgoing fiscal year has been better than the performance of the last year, said that there was a “gap between what we had realised and what we may actually have realised considering the potential of the economy.”He was of the view that as this was the last full-fiscal budget by the present team of economic managers, they should focus more on the wellbeing of the common man as election year fast approaches.Published in The Express Tribune, May 20, 2016.Like Business on Facebook , follow @TribuneBiz on Twitter to stay informed and join in the conversation.