The SME Foundation has made a series of proposals to be incorporated in the upcoming budget for accelerating the growth of SME industry.
The proposals include imposition of higher duty on imported products and cutting tax and VAT for domestic products.
The state-owned organisation placed 27-point budget proposals to the National Board of Revenue (NBR) on Tuesday to encourage domestic SMEs, particularly plastic and electric goods, light engineering, agro-processing and printing industries.
The budget proposals were prepared after a series of meetings with industry people and different stakeholders. The foundation recommended giving a 10-year tax holiday for labour intensive plastic industry for helping the sector increase production and facilitate exports.
“The tax holiday in the plastic industry will also help generate employment,” said an SME statement. Tariff withdrawal from recycling of plastic wastage was also proposed in order to reduce environment pollution.
Slapping 60% uniform complementary duty on imports of plastic products like boxes, cases, crates and similar articles, furniture, tableware, kitchenware, plastic hanger and accessories was also proposed. At present such duty ranges from 0% to 60%.
The foundation said the government has announced ago-processing industry as thrust sector and gave 20% subsidy.
It added: “Higher corporate tax on this sector hindered SME’s expansion and so we proposed to cut such tax to 20% from existing 35%.”
The foundation also proposed to increase duty to 25% from existing 10% on importing primary and secondary curriculum books to boost local printing industry and to lower import duty on equipment used in toy manufacturing to 5% from existing 10-25% to make domestic toy manufacturing industry to flourish.
