Pakistan receives last tranche of Saudi Arabia's $3b aid package

Inflow marks back-to-back receipt of $1b deposits in SBP reserves

KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has received the last tranche of $1 billion from Saudi Arabia on Friday.

The inflow marks back-to-back receipt of $1 billion deposits in SBP foreign currency reserves for the second successive day, under the friendly countries' economic assistance package.

On Thursday, UAE deposited $1 billion under the recently announced $3 billion cash programme for Pakistan.

"SBP has also received the third tranche of USD one billion from SaudiArabia," the central bank said in a tweet on Friday.

 



Earlier, the SBP announced that Pakistan’s foreign currency reserves had dropped to a 57-month low of $6.63 billion as of January 18, 2019. With these reserves, Pakistan could hardly cover one-and-a-half-month of imports.

The receipt of the tranches have increased Pakistan's capacity to conveniently make international payments for imports and debt servicing.

The reserves have continued to drop for the last two years due to the country’s high foreign expenditure and low income, which is better known as the current account deficit.

The deficit was recorded at $8 billion in the first half (Jul-Dec) of the current fiscal year 2018-19, which was slightly lower than $8.4 billion in the same period of previous year.