World Bank President David Malpass has chided other development banks for lending too quickly to heavily indebted countries, saying some were helping worsen already-challenging debt situations.
Malpass said at a World Bank-International Monetary Fund debt forum in Washington that the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development were contributing to debt problems.
Malpass said “we have a situation where other international financial institutions and to some extent development finance institutions as a whole, certainly the official export credit agencies, have a tendency to lend too quickly and to add to the debt problem of the countries,”. He said the Asian Development Bank was “pushing billions of dollars” into a fiscally challenging situation in Pakistan while the African Development Bank was doing the same in Nigeria and South Africa. A spokesman for the Asian Development Bank could not immediately be reached for comment. The Manila-based development lender in December approved $1.3 billion in loans for Pakistan, including $1 billion for immediate budget support to shore up the country’s public finances and $300 million to help reform the country’s energy sector. The loans came as the country is struggling with billions of dollars in debt to China from Belt and Road infrastructure projects, which helped cause Pakistan to turn to the IMF for a $6 billion loan programme in 2019.
He said there needed to be more coordination among international financial institutions to coordinate lending and maintain high standards of transparency. “And so we have a very real problem of the IFIs themselves adding to the debt burden and, and there’s pressure then I think on the IMF to sort through it and look at the best interest for the country,” he said.
.
