ISLAMABAD – Pakistan is depleting its dollar reserves at the fastest pacein Asia and may soon have a buffer that’s smaller than Cambodia, an economythat’s less than a 10th of its size, *reported Bloomberg*link>.

Reserves have dropped by about a fifth in the past year to reach $13.5billion in February, while in Cambodia they’ve increased a third to $11.2billion in January, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.Pakistan’s reserves are expected to drop as much as $2.2 billion by June,according to Insight Securities Pvt.

Pakistan is facing a balance of payments crunch. Its current-accountdeficit has ballooned by 50 percent in the past eight months to $10.8billion, fueled by rising imports as the economy grows close to 5 percentand Chinese funders add new power plants. With reserves coming underpressure, authorities devalued the currency for the second time in fourmonths last week.

“Your hot money capital inflows are not coming in. Real conditions of theeconomy are that exports are not picking up,” said Turab Hussain, head ofthe economics department at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.“Bangladesh are the ones that are a stronger economy now.”

Once known as East Pakistan before being separated in 1971, Bangladesh’sreserves are now more than double those of Pakistan’s, with exports thatexceed its South Asian counterpart. Both nations as well as Cambodia arecompetitors in global textile markets.

New Zealand and Kazakhstan are among other Asia Pacific countries withsmaller economies but more reserves than Pakistan, according to datacompiled by Bloomberg.