The government has resolved the long-standing demand of freelancers while enabling them to channel remittances through the international gateway — PayPal.
This was revealed by Caretaker Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Dr Umar Saif while talking to journalists.
The minister informed that the ministry is all set to launch several digital initiatives next week including channelizing remittances through PayPal to make Pakistan a ‘Tech Destination’. Currently, there is no financial instrument available to facilitate payments.
The minister said that PayPal is not coming to Pakistan but an agreement has been reached under which the remittances would be channelized from Paypal through a third party. The formal launching ceremony in this regard is scheduled on January 11, he added.
The minister, while highlighting the initiatives taken by the government to bolster exports of the IT and telecom sector, stated that the sector’s official export is currently $2.6 billion. Still, the actual figure is around $5 billion as the industry parks a major portion outside the country to pay salaries of their international employees placed with foreign clients and incur monthly expenses for cloud hosting, marketing, and sales on platforms like Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, etc.
“We worked with the SIFC and the State Bank to make a big policy intervention, allowing IT companies to keep 50 percent of their export revenue in dollars in an account in Pakistan and make their international expenses without any restrictions from this amount”, said the minister. He added that IT companies are beginning to bring their dollars back home, and our export revenue jumped by 13 percent in one month.
