Tunisia has begun negotiations with the International Monetary Fund to obtain a loan to finance the budget, in exchange for launching a set of deep economic reforms.
The Tunisian authorities are endeavoring to convince the various international financial institutions of the seriousness of the economic reforms they will adopt, and to open the doors of financing the Tunisian economy through the approval of the International Monetary Fund, and behind it the rest of the international donor financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the European Bank for Development and Investment.
Tunisia's budget during the current year needs at least 19 billion Tunisian dinars (about 6.7 billion dollars) to finance a major financial gap that may expand to reach 22 billion dinars as a result of the increasing rise in oil prices in international markets, where the Ministry of Finance adopts a reference price when preparing the budget, which does not exceed $ 45 per barrel.
The Tunisian finance faces a number of pressures, among them the necessity to provide 15.5 billion dinars to pay off the external debt service, of which 10 billion are in foreign exchange. Tunisia had obtained during the period between 2016 and 2020 a loan from the IMF amounting to 2.9 billion dollars, and it was extended in eight installments conditional on a set of economic reforms, the date of obtaining some of these installments was delayed due to the Tunisian government's failure to adhere to the structural economic reforms proposed by the IMF.
Source (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat Newspaper, Edited)
