ST. GEORGE’S, Grenada, CMC – The Grenada government says. At the same time, it successfully ended a three-year restructuring program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) seven years ago. It has no intention of removing some of the measures because of their impact on the economy.
“So, although we can say that formally the program or the major elements of the program are over, in a real sense, many of the measures that came into force made sense, and we are keeping them in place,” Foreign Affairs Minister Joseph Andall, told a town hall meeting on Monday night.
Responding to a question about the status of the 2014-16 IMF restructuring program, implemented under the last administration, Joseph explained that Grenada entered that program out of a need to restructure the island’s fiscal framework.
“We had a high and unsustainable debt, the economy needed some urgent attention, and as a result, the government of the day agreed with the IMF,” he told the meeting.
The main program’s primary objectives are to restore fiscal and debt sustainability, boost long-term growth through structural reforms, and safeguard the resiliefinancial sector’s resilienceornerstone of the program was a solid fiscal adjustment that focused on curbing spending and widening the revenue base while maintaining space for infrastructure spending and social safety nets.
The fiscal adjustment was complemented by a comprehensive debt restructuring, which secured meaningful debt reduction, addressed financing shortfalls, and firmly put Grenada’s public debt on a downward path towards the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) regional target of 6 percent of GDP by 2020.
As part of the program, the then-Keith Mitchell government enacted several new pieces of legislation including the Fiscal Responsibility Act which created the Fiscal Responsibility Oversight Committee, the Public Debt Management Act, and the Public Finance Management Act.
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