“We have received a request for assistance, and since we have had limited engagement with Iran in recent times, the process of obtaining the information, we require to assess the request, is taking time,” Jihad Azour, Director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department, told Reuters.
“Any member of the Fund has the same rights of access to the IMF financing and resources subject to the fund’s rules and approval by the director board,” Azour said.
International Monetary Fund predicted that Iran’s inflation rate would improve in 2020 and put Iran’s inflation rate in 2020 at 34.2 percent, the rate of which stood at 41.1 percent in 2019.
In addition, IMF predicted that Iran’s financial deficit in 2020 will increase to 9.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the ate of which hit 5.7 percent in 2019.
Iran, the Middle East country worst affected by the new coronavirus outbreak, asked last month for the $5 billion from the IMF’s Rapid Financing Initiative, an emergency program that aids countries faced with sudden shocks such as natural disasters.
Despite the widespread global crisis, IMF had predicted that Iran’s economic growth will improve in 2020 as compared to a year earlier.
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