(Washington) The board of directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday approved the disbursement of a new tranche of 7.5 billion dollars to Argentina, announced on Wednesday a spokesperson for the Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs. Economy.
The amount corresponds to the fifth and sixth examinations of the aid program for the South American country, which had been validated at the end of July by an agreement between the Argentine government and the international institution.
This new disbursement now brings to $36.3 billion the total amount of funds already allocated to Argentina since the start of the aid program in March 2022.
In total, this 30-month program is to provide total aid of $44 billion (about 32 billion SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, the IMF’s unit of account based on a basket of currencies) to Buenos Aires, by far the largest aid program currently implemented by the IMF.
This is an important agreement for the Argentine Minister of Economy Sergio Massa, candidate in the presidential election next October for the “Union for the Fatherland” coalition which brings together the formations supporting the outgoing government of Alberto Fernandez (center left). Massa was in Washington on Wednesday, where he met with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva.
On August 13, the presidential primary, which serves as a kind of general rehearsal before the election, had given birth to a surprise by placing Javier Milei, an ultraliberal and libertarian economist of 52 years in the lead with 30% of the vote.
Announced as one of the favorites in the election, Mr. Massa only came third with 27% of the vote.
The Argentinian authorities immediately devalued the peso by around 20%, in order to protect it from a potential market reaction after the primary, with the central bank announcing an increase in interest rates for term deposits. from 97% to 118%.
The IMF for its part hailed “the recent actions and commitment of the [Argentinean] authorities in the direction of preserved stability, the reconstitution of foreign exchange reserves, and the improvement of the budgetary order”, commented the spokesperson for the international institution Julie Kozack, without explicitly citing the measures of the day.
The agreement signed in March 2022 between the IMF and the government, the 13th agreement between the institution and the South American country since 1983, aims precisely to control the chronic inflation of the country.
The IMF anticipates growth there of just 0.2% for 2023, with inflation expected to decline somewhat by the end of the year, to 88%.
Inflation, however, reached 115.6% year on year in June, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INDEC).
