By: Rickard Ekstedt
On January 25, the Paris Club announced the cancellation of nearly $6 billion of Myanmar’s debt,[i],[ii] which amounts to over 60% of the total debt Myanmar owes to this group of western countries.[iii] Of the total amount, more than $3 billion will be cancelled by Japan alone. Officials from the Japanese government met in October with officials from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Tokyo, Japan to discuss these debt relief efforts.[iv] Besides Japan, another notable country is Norway, whose government has agreed to cancel all of Myanmar’s $534 million debt owed to them.[v] Stephen Groff, vice president of ADB, hailed this as a “tipping point”[vi] for the country economically, and Myanmar Finance Minister Win Shein promised that the “resources freed up by the debt relief would be used for development projects and poverty reduction.”[vii]
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