By approving the extended arrangement for BiH prior to local elections in October, the International Monetary Fund did not turn a blind eye to BiH politicians, stated the Head of IMF Mission in BiH Nadeem Ilahi.
Ilahi reminded that first tranche for BiH in the amount of around 150 million BAM was recently paid, after all requirements have been met, and that the payment of the following tranches will be directly dependent on implementation of reforms that the BiH structures committed themselves at when they asked for an extended arrangement.
“Only when all the previous measures have been implemented, we approved the program. The IMF has paid the first tranche and now we are awaiting the next level of reforms. The authorities will now have to implement those. The next review is in December or January, which is soon, and at the same time there are many structural benchmarks that should be met by the end of the year. If those are not met, then we might have a problem in terms of progress in the program. Of course, when we evaluate these benchmarks, we will take into consideration the technical problems that might be an issue,” said Ilahi and added that the extended arrangement contains 26 challenging reform activities, including reforms of wages in public sector, reform of banks, of tax system, and many other reforms.
“When we were discussing the arrangement at the session of the Steering Committee, we discussed whether the program contains too many structural conditions. A large number of conditions are those we set for the governments of the two entities and the Council of Ministers. However, when you look at all the conditions, I certainly cannot say that we have turned a blind eye to BiH politicians. There are some conditions that have not been met in the previous program plus the new ones. I think it is important that people in BiH understand that no tranche will be paid in the future unless there are concrete results. On the other hand, everything we have inserted into the program is considered to be necessary in order to facilitate the recovery of BiH economy,” Ilahi emphasized.
Ilahi pointed out that the IMF considers BiH to be far from the economic potential that it can achieve among all other countries in southeastern Europe and that this is the reason for the realistic optimism that consistent implementation of these reforms will lead to good results.
(Source: fokus.ba)
