The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and India will hold the first global debt meeting on Friday, bringing together creditors, including China, and borrowing countries to try to find solutions for countries with unsustainable levels of debt.
Participating borrowing countries will include Ghana, Ethiopia and Zambia, according to what Bloomberg cites from sources reviewed by Al Arabiya.net.
Lenders including France, the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan, as well as the Institute of International Finance, the Global Financial Industry Federation and private sector lenders, will attend, the sources said. One source added that envoys from Sri Lanka, Ecuador and Suriname would also be present.
In turn, the representative of the International Monetary Fund said that the meeting is aimed at eliminating the current shortcomings in the debt restructuring, stressing that the meeting will take place on Friday, but without indicating the countries concerned. The World Bank and the US Treasury declined to comment.
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The Paris Club, made up mostly of traditional creditor countries, joined China, India and Saudi Arabia in 2020 under the auspices of the G-20, the largest economic forum, to agree on a roadmap known as the Common Framework to restructure the debt of countries that have defaulted on their obligations, on the problem. in each specific case.
The agreement has been shelved and stipulated that it applies only to low-income countries, leaving politicians looking for another way to bail out or restructure both poor and middle-income countries facing hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.
One person said that the meeting would also focus on ensuring the comparability of transactions between official and private lenders, as well as resolving technical and legal issues.
For its part, China—now the largest bilateral creditor to developing countries—on several occasions of debt restructuring has insisted that multilateral development banks such as the World Bank bear losses, which the institution and the US have dismissed as unfeasible under its operating model.
The meeting will take place ahead of the G20 finance ministers and central bankers meeting next week in Bangalore, India.
While some G20 members will discuss debt forgiveness on the sidelines of the meeting, Bloomberg sources said, it will not include all of the roundtable participants as the borrowing countries will not be present.
