Fund Concessional Financial Support For Low Income Countries Responding To The Pandemic

Download or read book Fund Concessional Financial Support For Low-Income Countries—Responding To The Pandemic written by International Monetary Fund and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper proposes a package of policy reforms and a funding strategy to ensure that the Fund has the capacity to respond flexibly to LICs’ needs during the pandemic and recovery. The key policy reforms proposed include: • raising the normal annual/cumulative limits on access to PRGT resources to 145/435 percent of quota, the same thresholds for normal access in the GRA; • eliminating the hard limits on exceptional access (EA) to PRGT resources for the poorest LICs, enabling them to obtain all financing on concessional terms if the EA criteria are met; • changes to the framework for blending concessional and non-concessional resources to make it more robust and less complex; • stronger safeguards to address concerns regarding debt sustainability and capacity to repay the Fund; and • retaining zero interest rates on PRGT loans, consistent with the established rules for setting these interest rates.