Still no funds

IT has been a long wait. It seems that the IMF is still refusing to budge, even as Pakistani authorities thought the bailout loan would be finalised and the long-stalled funding programme resumed after confirmation of the promised financial assistance from Saudi Arabia and UAE. That the demand from the IMF for further assurances to seal the deal came just around the time Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was assuring the markets that the lender had now no reason to put off its approval for the staff-level agreement after “friendly countries” had given monetary assurances was quite surprising. Indeed, other nations in financial distress, such as Sri Lanka, Zambia, etc, also had to wait — for a longer time than usual — to finalise their respective loan deals with the IMF in recent months owing to the clash between China and the Western economies over how to provide relief to poor and middle-income countries. But in Pakistan’s case, the Fund appears to have little justification to further delay the resumption of the programme. Initially, the IMF’s reluctance to complete the performance review and its insistence on the implementation of harsh prior actions were seen as the outcome of the deepening trust gap between the Fund and Pakistan due to the repeated breach of programme targets by both previous dispensations and the present government. But the IMF kept delaying matters despite the PDM government executing practically all prior actions to qualify for the Fund’s dollars.