ISLAMABAD, May 14: The visiting five-member IMF review mission headed by Klaus Enders has expressed satisfaction over the current state of the economy and said it would recommend to their executive board to disburse the third tranche of $109 million to Pakistan by June 30 this year.

Sources in the multilateral agencies told Dawn here on Tuesday that the mission has almost completed the review of the second and third quarters of 2001-2002. The mission, which is expected to leave for Washington on Friday, has assured the senior officials of the ministry of finance and the Central Board of Revenue (CBR) that favourable recommendations will be made to the executive board for the release of third tranche, out of $1.3 billion Poverty Reduction Growth Facility (PRGF) by June 30. The board is likely to meet in the third week of next month.

“the mission feels that Pakistan government is implementing its home-grown reforms agenda, especially in line with Interim - Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (I-PRSP) and therefore there will not be hesitation on our part to make positive recommendations for the next instalment,” said a source.

When contacted, he said the success of the three-year PRGF will be gauged only by seeing that the government continued to scrupulously implement structural reforms programme in all the major sectors of the economy.

Asked whether the IMF had allowed the government to revise downward the revenue collection target a fourth time, and also agreed on a 6.1 per cent fiscal deficit, he said these were all speculations and that such issues were still to be agreed upon. “We also have yet to agree on next financial year’s revenue collection target,” he said, requesting anonymity.

The thrust of the talks with the IMF mission, a government official said, was to stay focussed on removing distortions from the economic and financial system of the country.

Availability of adequate resources for poverty programmes is an important consideration in determining the effectiveness of the I-PRSP. Both the IMF and the government officials believe that I-PRSP demonstrates the need to closely monitor the effectiveness of government policies and measure progress on poverty reduction initiatives. “For this purpose, it is important to combine poverty reduction efforts at the federal, provincial and district level and develop localised capacity to monitor progress of I-PRSP indicators,” says the strategy paper.