IMF: $16.6bn in financing to Middle East economies

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has offered new financing to the Middle East and North Africa worth $16.6 billion to overcome the COVID-19 crisis, Anadolu reported yesterday.

According to the report, the IMF said it offered technical support for member states in the Middle East to ease the impact of the pandemic.

The funding programmes were offered to Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia, the IMF said.

Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department, Jihad Azour, said that the economies of the Middle East are standing at a “critical turning point” as many of the countries are facing a new wave of coronavirus due to their inability to afford vaccines.

He also said that, at the same time, the region is witnessing an uneven and fragile economic recovery in light of the emergence of new challenges, including the increasing rate of inflation and the decline in the space available to act through macro policies.

Azour said that the region is striving to deal with this “difficult situation”, but it needs to know that it should change its policies and treat the deep-rooted weakness points in order to fully recover.

In a different report, issued recently, the IMF said that the accumulated cost of COVID-19 for the Middle East and North Africa would hit $200 billion by the end of 2021.

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