Pakistan to impose IMF-approved

economic restructuring program

A senior Pakistani official told the country's Senate Tuesday that the Pakistan People's Party-led coalition government will be seeking International Monetary Fund approval of its economic program in the next two to three weeks.

"Adviser to Prime Minister on Finance" Shaukat Tarin said the government requires IMF "endorsement of our plans" if Islamabad is to obtain the billions of US dollars that it desperately needs from international financial institutions and friendly states. International financial institutions, Tarin claimed, have "agreed [to] and appreciated our economic program and social safety net, but they desire to get it approved from the IMF before offering us a financial facility."
Pakistan, whose economy has been roiled by galloping inflation, power shortages, the withdrawal of foreign funds, and the rapid depreciation of its currency, faces a severe balance of payments crisis. At the end of October, the Pakistani central bank held foreign reserves of just $3.71 billion, less than the country's September import bill of $3.8 billion.

Tarin's Senate presentation was full of contradictions. He claimed that the IMF has not pressed Pakistan to take severe austerity measures or otherwise sought to impose harsh conditions. Yet he invoked the metaphor of an ill-person having to take "bitter pills" and said that the IMF and foreign banks deem the government's revised economic targets as "ambitious" and "needing "a lot of discipline and a lot of determination."

The truth is the Pakistani government has already begun to implement IMF-type "restructuring," including several measures directly at the IMF's behest, and this restructuring will have a devastating impact on Pakistan's toiling masses.

While the Pakistani elite has been conniving with imperialism in the form of the IMF and foreign banks to "save" Pakistan's economy at the expense of the people, it has been seeking to protect its own obscene wealth by covertly funneling billions of dollars out of the country and, in the process, has further aggravated the balance of payments crisis.

The Dawn has reported that four billion dollars was transferred out of Pakistan in recent months using a 2003 amendment to the country's foreign-exchange laws that was so secret that "during all this period neither the Finance Ministry nor the State Bank of Pakistan posted it on their respective websites." "Experts say," added the Nov. 12 Dawn article, that the covert amendment "was used by the rich and influential to send billions of dollars through ‘legal' channels" out of the country.