IMF urges FG to rebuild infrastructure

A CALL has gone on Federal Government by International Monetary Fund (IMF) to rebuild Nigeria’s ailing infrastructure to boost economic growth.
Deputy Director of IMF Fiscal Affairs Department, Mr. Paolo Mauro, made the call yesterday in a presentation on Fiscal Monitor Report for October at the on-going IMF-World Bank Group (WBG) Annual Meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
Taking hard looks at global public sector assets and liabilities, 10 years after a financial squeeze, Mauro said that increasing revenues was very important for Nigeria as well as significant prudent choices on what these revenues would be spent on.
“Generally, I think it is not only about shoring up the revenue, but also being careful about the spending by improving the choices that one makes on which infrastructure project to carry out. How does one go about selecting the ones that are really going to boost growth? So I think it is a priority to increase revenues but also to be careful about the ways we can make spending more efficient,” Mauro said.
He reckoned that with ratio of interest payments to revenue high in Nigeria, increase in revenues would boost social spending, recalibrate infrastructure and ease tax administration to further trigger economic growth.
In his own contribution, Director of Fiscal Affairs Department, Mr. Vitor Gaspar, said that global debt continued to rise in 2017 reaching an all-time high of $182 trillion.