Skopje, 12 October 2022

The delegation led by the Governor of the National Bank, Anita Angelovska Bezhoska and the Minister of Finance, Fatmir Besimi, will participate in the regular Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WB), which will be held  this week in Washington, United States of America.

Within the Annual Meetings, the delegation is scheduled to meet with senior representatives of the IMF and World Bank, as well as representatives of other international financial organizations and institutions. In that context, the delegation will have a meeting with Mr. Bo Lee, Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, at which future closer cooperation that our country will have within the newly approved PLL arrangement will be discussed. Also, individual meetings of the delegation are planned with the Director of the European Department at the IMF, Alfred Kamer, with the IMF Executive Director, Paul Hilbers and the Alternate Executive Director, Luc Dresse, as well as with the Head of the IMF Mission, Bergliot Barkbox. The focus of the meetings with the high officials of the IMF will be the monetary policy and the economic situation in the country According to the schedule, the Governor will hold separate meetings with representatives of the Statistics Department and the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, where the results of the current cooperation between the National Bank and the IMF will be discussed, as well as the possibilities for further improvement of the operational activities of the National Bank in the domain of monetary policy implementation, in cooperation with the Fund's experts. 

As every year, the Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank are primarily devoted to the current developments in the global economy. This time, leaders, experts and activists will talk about how best to respond to the challenges and uncertainty that the two successive crises have brought to the world economy. Part of the topics for discussion will be the pandemic, climate change and the war in Ukraine, which caused the sharpest slowdown in economic activity in the last 80 years, as well as increased inflation, the energy crisis and the growth of state indebtedness.

The annual meetings are held regularly, every autumn, and are attended by Governors of central banks, Ministers of finance, senior representatives of financial organizations, non-governmental organizations, to discuss topics and policies that will contribute to sustainable economic growth in the world.