World Bank to advise Fiji on economy

November 12, 2009 07:30:59 PM

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The World Bank expects to play a supportive advisory role in Fiji’s return to economic prosperity, a spokesperson accompanying an International Monetary Fund (IMF) team to Fiji has said.

The World Bank’s Sydney-based communications officer Aleta Moriarty told FijiLive she was accompanying the IMF team to carry out its regular economic review that it provided to its member countries.

“This aim of this visit is to analyse the economic situation in the country. The livelihood of the people of Fiji depends upon economic stability. To this end the World Bank will be looking closely at the economic conditions in the country and will provide suggestions on how best to improve the economic conditions for the people of Fiji,” said Moriarty.

The IMF part of the delegation is here to conduct its 2009 Article IV Mission, a regular economic appraisal process that it performs for its member countries, and it announced on Tuesday that its team will review Fiji’s macroeconomic developments and the outlook, as well as discuss related government policies.

Fiji’s Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, who met with the delegation early this week, said yesterday that the Article IV Mission would assist Fiji in preparatory work on an Economic Reform Program that the government has already planned for.

Fiji’s challenge, he said, was to lift its dismal growth rates of below two per cent in the past to five per cent in the next three to five years and the only way this was possible was through reforms in a number of sectors.

The last publicly released result of an IMF Article IV Mission to Fiji was in 2004, where IMF directors expressed concerns about the increase in public debt - which at the time was over 40 percent of GDP and considered too high - and the deterioration in the external position due to rising imports, among other things.

They also urged the authorities then to make “a front-loaded effort to carry fiscal consolidation forward more rapidly.”