Tunisian Finance Minister Siham Nemsiyeh expected to reach an agreement with the International Monetary Fund by the end of next April, as Tunisia seeks to guarantee financial resources capable of securing state expenditures and employee wages, pending the final agreement on the economic reforms program.
The Tunisian economy needs about 2.7 billion Tunisian dinars to cover wages per month, as it currently relies on internal collection resources to cover those compulsory expenses, and it is waiting to activate the Algerian loan, estimated at 300 million dollars, pending the success of negotiations with the Fund.
In a related context, the Foreign Investment Promotion Agency (governmental) revealed that foreign investments declined for the fourth year in a row, by 34.5 percent between 2018 and 2021, to reach about 1.876 billion dinars by the end of last year. The Tunisian authorities had expected about 2.3 billion dinars of foreign investments during the year 2021, but the economic stagnation and the slowdown of most activities prevented these results from being achieved. The sectoral distribution of foreign direct investment flows in Tunisia shows that the manufacturing industries attracted no less than 69.7 percent of those investments, and they headed towards the mechanical, electrical and electronic industries, which amounted to 663.5 million dinars.
Source (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat Newspaper, Edited)
