A government consultant explained how Iraq liquidated and reduced its foreign loans and debt.
“A positive indicator of the decline in external obligations, and future external loans will be limited when needed to income-generating and operating projects,” the Prime Minister’s financial adviser, Mazhar Mohammed Saleh told {Euphrates News}.
He pointed out, “Many of the external debts committed to and not withdrawn have been liquidated, which means that Iraq follows {the golden rule} in borrowing, which is spent that the returns on the use of external loans spent on productive projects exceed the cost of the loan itself, and this is what is called {productive external loans}.”
The government spokesman for Al-Awadi announced yesterday that “the government has taken a series of executive measures, and adopted a package of financial decisions, which ended in reducing external public debt by more than 50%, to reduce the debt from $19.729 billion in late 2022, to $15.976 billion in 2023, reaching nearly $8.9 billion this year.”
He pointed out, “These financial steps, (which included the suspension of a number of borrowing operations due to their relaxity and non-productivity, organizing, managing and auditing debts, restructuring and directing some debts to establish strategic projects), aim not to mortgage the Iraqi economy to commitments that may affect, in the future, the political decision, or the path of national development, and they coincide with an urban renaissance, and reconstruction of infrastructure, which opens the way for a promising future and a refreshed economy, in which our current and future generations perform the best performance, and receive the greatest opportunities.”
