Amman: World Bank Country Director for the Mashreq, Jean-Christophe Carret, said Jordan “needs” to follow up on reform measures and establish a monitoring system to learn from implementation experience and communicate effectively for progress.
Carret added in an article he authored that Jordan’s reform journey would not be “linear or easy,” explaining that there would always be trade-offs between focusing on stability and reform, the continuation of external pressures and the upcoming update of the World Bank’s Systematic Country Diagnostic of the country, an analytical product on how a government can reduce poverty and promote prosperity.
Carret said Jordan is in a “good” position to accelerate reform based on successes in responding to crises to generate investment-led growth and develop flexible systems to manage future shocks.
He noted that the vision of economic modernisation and it’s implementation programme for 2023-2025 offers an “important” roadmap to apply.
He added that with the start of work on developing the World Bank’s new country partnership strategy for the next five years for Jordan, the Bank would continue to stand by Jordan throughout its reform journey.
Carret explained that while countries face the repercussions of multiple crises, Jordan’s experience offers lessons in resilience and maintaining stability amid turbulence over the past two decades, indicating that the Jordanian economy has survived regional conflicts and pioneered a progressive and development-oriented response model for refugees.
He added that Jordan weathered the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the shocks of rising global commodity prices.
The World Bank official added that despite the “difficult” global environment, Jordan’s growth accelerated in the first nine months of 2022 to 2.7 per cent, driven by a strong recovery in tourism, a reopening of the economy and an improvement in exports, noting that inflation was relatively contained in Jordan.
He added that the response to the multiple crises in Jordan led to an increase in Jordan’s debt burden to high levels and managed its debt successfully by building investor confidence, accessing global financial markets and bolstering the mobilisation of local revenues.
The government, he added, introduced measures to support resilience to manage debt through foreign borrowing and reliable domestic financing.
The government responses showed Jordan’s ability to maintain stability amidst crises, he added, explaining that Jordan has the opportunity to turn its attention to completing structural reforms to achieve comprehensive and sustainable growth based on investment and job creation, especially for youth and women.
Carret talked about Jordan’s economic reform journey through Jordan’s Vision 2025 and the vision of economic modernisation that determined the course of the country’s reform journey, explaining that Jordan took “important and difficult” actions, including reforming the country’s social protection.
“The country is also pushing decisive policies and legislation that will help boost investment and improve labour market outcomes, including for women, as Jordan has been the first mover in placing climate action at the heart of the country’s development model and is taking major steps to enhance efficiency, flexibility and financial sustainability in the energy and water sectors,” Carret said.
He added that Jordan is making progress in transparency and open data, which are at the core of good governance and evidence-based decision-making based on the Open Data Inventory (ODIN) that measures the statistical presentations of countries and the openness of data.
Carret said between 2020 and 2022, Jordan moved from 82nd to 37th place in the ODIN world rankings. The Jordanian state also reformed the public procurement system and introduced the Electronic Procurement System (JONEPS) to enhance efficiency and transparency.
Source: Jordan News Agency