Kharkavets wants IMF loan

The Belarusian minister of finance doesn't leave hopes for getting a loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Belarus's main economic agencies – the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economy and the National Bank – began to develop the concept of the macroeconomic reform programme, which, if approved by the International Monetary Fund, will allow the country to get a new loan,” Interfax news agency reports.

Minister of finance Andrei Kharkavets said it during a call-in show organised by the Ministry of Finance.

“We are working over the issue now. The Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economy and the National Bank assumed the obligations. We are preparing a package of proposals to understand how close the IMF is ready to cooperate with us,” Kharkavets said commenting on the state of the dialogue with the Fund on obtaining new resources by Minsk.

“We are trying to formulate our vision and, if we succeed, have a detailed discussion of these issues during the spring session [of the IMF and the World Bank],” the minister of finance noted.

Speaking about a possible format of discussion of Belarus's intentions, Kharkavets said: “We are not talking about the programme. We are talking about conceptual approaches toward mid-term development prospects.”

The minister thinks the Fund's representatives gave a signal of readiness for discussing particular parameters of a possible programme during the work of the IMF mission in Minsk in March.

“The results of the mission's work show that the IMF experts are ready to discuss the macroeconomic policy we proposed for consideration of the Fund. We have reached an understanding. They, for their part, say that if the government represents its vision of structural reforms and possibly quantitative indexes we would like to achieve, it will be the matter of discussion with the Fund. These are new words that never been heard before,” Kharkavets said.

“If I interpret their statement correctly, it seems to me that the IMF experts are ready work with Belarus on the macroeconomic reform programme. The say it is the government that should prepare its vision of reforms,” the minister explained confirming that “positions of the IMF have not changed much” at this stage.

Kharkavets said about the position of the Belarusian side: “We are ready to work with the IMF. We say it several times a year.”

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