Pakistan may fail to persuade IMF for bailout, says EIU

KARACHI: Pakistan may fail to convince its international lender of last resort, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to plug the economy’s widening current account gap, but neighbouring China is likely to help the south Asian country get out of the existing foreign exchange trouble, a top British think-tank said.

“We continue to expect that a bailout package from the IMF will be hard to come by, owing to political resistance from both the US and China,” the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said in a latest report. Pakistan has adopted IMF’s financing programs 14 times since 1980. The last three-year program ($6.6 billion extended fund facility) ended in September 2016 with the country having achieved more than five percent growth during the years under the IMF’s surveillance.