On June 7, during his visit to Georgia, Mr. Anthony De Lannoy, the Executive Director of the IMF who represents Georgia along with the other 15 countries at the IMF Board of Directors, addressed an audience of ISET researchers, students, and management, as well as senior representatives of the National Bank of Georgia, with an overview of the IMF and its cooperation with Georgia.

Mr. De Lannoy spoke of the IMF as an institution and described its history, structure, functions, instruments, and evolution.

He further explained that the IMF’s activities include surveillance, in which the IMF acts as a global monitor over the economic, financial and exchange rate policies of its members, and a catalyst of the countries’ economic development; it provides to capacity development by providing technical cooperation support and contributes to policy analysis of various beneficiaries; and it extends lending, which is realized in its own currency Special Drawing Rights or SDR, which is the IMF’s own currency with 1 SDR being an equivalent of ca. 1.36$, through a range of financial concessional and non-concessional instruments, such as “precautionary and liquidity credit lines”, “extended fund facilities”, “standby arrangements’, “rapid credit facilities” and others, depending on the needs of the IMF members in covering their payment imbalance and their quota at the Fund (i.e. the members’ voting rights and access to funding relative to the amount of their contribution and their economic standing).

Georgia, which became a member of the IMF back in 1992, is using three credit facilities from the IMF (approved in 2012, 2014, and 2017) to realize its reforms, with a total value of SDR 435.40 mln. (the equivalent of $592.144 mln.) due for repayment before 2021. Mr. De Lannoy noted that thanks to Georgia’s prudent and proactive financial policies, Georgia is firmly on track with its programs and credit repayments.

Over the decade following the global financial meltdown, the IMF has been an object of heated debate, while its role, according to Mr. De Lannoy, has always been that of a “firefighter”, which should not be blamed for pouring too much water while putting flames out.

During the Q&A session following Mr. De Lannoy’s talk, the audience queried him on various related issues, ranging from crypto-currency to the flexibility of the Fund’s policies and its relations with its partner, the World Bank.

Next week, Tbilisi State University will be hosting the Deputy Managing Director of IMF, Mr. Tao Zhang.