LONDON (Reuters) – The G20 group of major economies have given the International Monetary Fund the go ahead to work on a new allocation of special drawing rights (SDRs), the head of the Fund Kristalina Georgieva said on Tuesday.
“We finally last Friday at the G20 meeting got a green (light) to work on a new SDR allocation,” Georgieva said during the IMF’s African Fiscal Forum.
“500 billion – in which each and every member of the IMF would receive its own share immediately contributing to reserves,” she said, without specifying the currency unit.
Finance officials from the Group of 20 major economies on Friday expressed broad support for boosting the IMF’s emergency reserves after U.S. officials dropped the previous administration’s opposition.
Italy, which heads the G20 this year, is pushing for a $500 billion issuance of SDRs, a move backed by many other G20 members as a way to provide liquidity to poor countries hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic without increasing their debt levels.
No one at the IMF was immediately able to clarify.
(Reporting by Karin Strohecker and Tom Arnold,)
