AMMAN — Minister of Finance Mohamad
Al-Ississ met
IMF Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department Jihad
Azour at the 2022 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group, held in Washington,
DC on April 18–24, to discuss the Jordanian government’s financial and economic
reform and the Kingdom’s relationship with the fund.
اضافة اعلان
“In navigating uncertainty, it is key to talk first to our
people and talk to the fund. The fund has been an advisor for Jordan. The fund
did not play around or force Jordan to implement policies that Jordan did not
believe in, and this is a key to success in navigating uncertainty.”
Economic
analyst
Mazen Irshaid told
Jordan News that Jordan “has full independence in
making economic decisions, but there is no denying that IMF does provide consultation, advice and
recommendations to the government, to help turn the wheels of the Jordanian
economy”.
Talking
about the growing foreign debt in the past few years, Irshaid said that according
to a report published at the beginning of April by the
Arab Investment and Export Credit Guarantee Corporation, Jordan’s foreign debt is expected to reach $39.3
billion by the end of this year, compared to $37.6 billion in 2021, $34.3 billion
in 2020, $30.3 billion in 2019 and $29.2 billion in 2018.
One
way of approaching this matter, he said, is for the government to “consider
internal loans more, as they are more tolerant” and almost with no conditions
attached, and with internal debt, repayment is done in Jordanian dinars, not in
foreign currency.
IMF
loans, he said, are given to Jordan at low interest
rates and long term, “but Jordan needs to implement
more serious, out-of-the-box solutions to help the economy, and not just depend
on foreign grants and loans”, he added.
While IMF-backed reforms require the country to
have a fiscal plan that focuses on revenue collection by broadening the tax
base, Ississ said that the government increased revenues last year without
raising taxes through a campaign to combat tax evasion and by restructuring the
tax and customs administration that ended tax exemptions.
Raad Al Tal, economist and professor at the
University of Jordan, agrees that this is this government’s approach. It “decreased some
fees, like customs duty, on some products and worked on collecting taxes from
either tax avoiders or tax evaders, which led to the increase in total tax
revenue, as shown in the general
budget of the past few years”.
According to Tal, Jordan “is in serious need of
a comprehensive economic plan that depends on entrepreneur economic sectors and
sectors with high employment rate”.
“We have grown in the past few years, but sadly,
the growth was not in high employment rate sectors, such as the construction
sector, which depends mostly on foreign labor,” he said.
The
economic workshops that the
Royal Court is hosting, which include discussions among
government and private sector officials, experts and academics, are discussing
real, and applicable, solutions for the Jordanian economy, Tal said, adding
that the conclusions of these workshops will be published by the end of May
this year.
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