Washington, DC – The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today endorsed a technical agreement of financial assistance to Ecuador worth 4,200 million dollars, which allows the immediate disbursement of 652 million dollars.
The decision was announced by the agency in a statement released in Washington after the agreement signed on February 21 between the IMF and the Ecuadorian authorities.
The agreement, part of the Extended Service of the IMF (SAF), provides support to the economic policies of the Ecuadorian Government in the next three years.
“The Ecuadorian authorities are implementing a broad program of reforms with the objective of modernizing the economy and paving the way for solid, sustained and equitable growth,” said IMF Director Christine Lagarde, at the end of the Executive Board meeting. according to the note.
Lagarde stressed that the policies of the Government of Ecuador “are intended to strengthen the fiscal position and improve competitiveness and thus contribute to reducing vulnerabilities, to strengthen dollarization and, over time, to promote growth and job creation.”
On February 21, the head of the IMF mission to Ecuador, Anna Ivanova, said in a statement that the agreement “is part of a larger effort of the international community.”
This effort “includes financial support of almost 6,000 million dollars over the next three years from the Development Bank of Latin America-CAF, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR) and the World Bank” , he added.
At the end of last month, the Economy Minister of Ecuador, Richard Martinez, said that reducing the fiscal deficit to lower figures than those registered in the last six years, ordering public finances and reaching recovery levels in various sectors of the economy were the landmarks of the country 2018.
After knowing the pact with the IMF, the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, who during his term (2007-2017) broke ties with that agency when considering that his credit conditions were against sovereignty, he called it “unnecessary”.
“It is highly costly at the social level and will be costly at the political level, even at an economic level,” Correa told Efe in Brussels on February 27.
For the ex-governor, “an agreement with the Fund is not an achievement, it’s just submission” and criticized that the Executive of Lenin Moreno prefers “to resort to the Fund saying that everything is wrong, that everything is in crisis, to protect those interests and give the club to the Ecuadorian people “.
Correa then anticipated that the $ 4.2 billion of the agreement with the IMF “will not get them in one fell swoop” and warned that “the other 5.8 billion that supposedly got from the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, are credits that they already exist, they will be renewed. “(EFEUSA)
