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Pakistan focused on concessional loans: Aziz

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is only focused on borrowing concessional foreign loans and seeking significant concessions from creditors including the rescheduling of official debt, Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz said on Sunday.

Addressing the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) at the South Korean island of Jeju, he said focussing on concessional foreign loans would provide support by lowering the debt-servicing burden.

These policies had enabled Pakistan to retire expensive loans from multilateral institutions like the World Bank and ADB, he added.

He said the loans from the institutions were not included in the rescheduling exercise and Pakistan owed $15 billion to these institutions.

The World Bank and ADB remained Pakistan’s development partners and an important source of finance but under a different set of priorities, the objective being to have a manageable portfolio whose implementation could be monitored to achieve satisfactory results, he added.

The Pakistani government intended to borrow for large-scale infrastructure projects in water, highways and power sectors, depending on the availability of high yielding priority infrastructure projects, Mr Aziz said.

About Pakistan-ADB relations, he said it was heartening that from the bank’s 2003 net income of $436 million, it had allocated $50 million to the Technical Assistance Trust Fund and $150 million to the Asian Development Fund, thereby demonstrating the ADB’s continued commitment to poverty reduction in Asia.

“These are exciting times for us as we find that our economic attainments have been outstanding under President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali’s capable leadership,” he said.

“A turnaround was possible because of continuity and consistency of our home-grown reform agenda punctuated by a broad based reforms programme that has covered all the key economic sectors, including fiscal management, finance and banking, capital markets, privatisation, agriculture, industrial policy, tax policy and administration, trade, oil and gas, water and power and information technology,” Mr Aziz added.

The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) developed by the government had brought the social sectors to the centre of economic planning, he also said.

Mr Aziz said pro-poor expenditures had been increased substantially. More importantly, a governance reforms programme targeted a revival of the judiciary, civil services, law enforcement, audit and accounts, accountability, public financial management and empowerment of people, he added.

“These reforms have led to the revival of a dormant economy now poised for take-off,” he said. Engineering, the cement industry, the auto industry, telecommunications, oil and gas and tourism were expanding industries, he told the meeting. app

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