Pakistan’s quiet export you’ve never heard of: tourists swiping their cards : Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics Dashboard unveils an interesting less talked side of payments data

When economists talk about Pakistan’s exports, the conversation usually stops at textiles, rice, and IT services. But there’s another export happening every single day — every time a foreign visitor pulls out their card at a Karachi restaurant or books a hotel online — and by the numbers, it’s not small.

On an average day this past quarter:

~87,800 transactions by foreign-issued cards inside Pakistan — about 62,200 in-store purchases and 25,600 online

Rs 664 million in value, roughly $2.4 million USD, moving through the economy daily, purely from foreign cards

In Balance of Payments terms, any money a non-resident spends inside Pakistan counts as an export — specifically, “Travel” services exports, the same category that covers tourism earnings. No different in principle from a textile shipment: value earned from a foreigner, flowing into the domestic economy.

Officially, SBP recorded $759 million in Travel services exports for FY24 — which works out to roughly $2.1 million a day across the full year. Card data alone is now running close to that daily pace ($2.4 million/day) through a single channel, for what should logically be just one slice of total travel spending (cash, hotel bookings, etc. aside).

Two things could be going on: card-based spending may now be doing the heavy lifting in how Pakistan actually earns its travel exports (cash tourism giving way to digital), or there’s a gap between how travel exports get compiled and how tourists are really spending. Either way, it points to card-based inbound spending as a bigger and more measurable daily export than it usually gets credit for — with a paper trail SBP already collects every quarter.

Worth a closer look from anyone working on Pakistan’s services trade numbers.

Data: State Bank of Pakistan, Payment Systems Quarterly Review, via the

SOURCE : Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics Payment Systems Dashboard — : https://lnkd.in/dVJC4QKd