It increasingly appears that the incumbent government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are going to ink the staff-level agreement sometime in June and the next IMF tranche will arrive by July. How important this deal is the finance minister Miftah Ismail has a highly informed perspective on it.
According to him, the IMF programme is important for the country because it would unlock inflows of other multilaterals such as the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
He has also said that Pakistan is expecting $ 1 billion from the WB in the ongoing fiscal year, some loans from Asian Infrastructure Development Bank and some inflows from the ADB besides $ 8.9 billion in the pipeline from the WB once the EFF programme is revived. The foregoing explicitly explains the criticality of the IMF programme.
In my view, the incumbent coalition government deserves praise for taking a very bold decision — raise in POL products’ prices — in order to meet a key IMF condition.
Saira Waqar (Karachi)
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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