BAGHDAD, 15 July 2003 — World Bank representatives visiting Baghdad yesterday met Iraqi leaders and business people to lend advice on how to bring the country’s shattered economy successfully through its postwar reconstruction.
Three bank officials shared their “lessons learned in transition economies” in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in a day-long meeting with members of Iraq’s new US-appointed Governing Council, top US Civil Administrator Paul Bremer told reporters after sitting in on the talks.
“We did come hoping to share with Iraqis the information we have about other countries that have gone through very difficult periods of transition. That is what Iraq faces,” said Joseph Saba, director of the bank’s country management unit. “We welcome our introduction of cooperation with Iraq and we’re quite excited about being here and being able to work again with a founding member” of the bank, Saba added.
He said the bank would look “not only at financial instruments but knowledge instruments, technical assistance and training to help Iraq through this period of transition.”
Saba did not provide details on the kind of economic assistance the bank was prepared to give. A coalition statement said the meeting would address price liberalization, macroeconomic stability, public enterprises, the banking sector and social protection services.
Governing Council member Raja Habib Kurzai, who attended yesterday’s talks, said the exchange “will be very useful for all of us to build a very prosperous Iraq in the future”.
Iraq’s economy has been driven into the ground under United Nations-imposed economic sanctions after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and this year’s US-led lightning invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.
Iraq’s annual gross domestic product had tumbled to $40 billion last year from $130 billion in 1979, US Treasury Undersecretary John Taylor told a Washington conference earlier this month.
Iraq’s debt to the group of industrialized creditor nations, known as the Paris Club, stands at $21.02 billion, almost entirely in arrears, the club has said.
Saba reiterated the club’s acknowledgment on July 10 that it was ready to restructure the public debt when Iraq is in a position to resume payments by the end of 2004.
Bremer has said the US-led coalition occupying Iraq had already spent $1 billion on the reconstruction effort and had budgeted $6 billion for the second half of 2003.
