THE CENTRAL BANK ACHIEVES ONE OF THE MAIN OBJECTIVES OF MONETARY POLICY IN 2023
Economy News-Baghdad
The objectives of the monetary policy of the Central Bank are to achieve economic growth and stability, and one of its main objectives is to reduce inflation rates and stabilize the prices of goods and services in very complex economic, security and political conditions in 2023 that the world is going through, especially the countries of the geographical region, in which our country is negatively and positively affected.
And that these conditions have been suffered by our economy for decades
, and the reason is the rentier economy and the dependence of 93%
as a rate of the general budget on oil, which constitutes about 60% of GDP, while the active economic sectors, namely agriculture, constitute 4.7% and industry does not exceed 2%,which are indicators that led to the lack of local production that covers the consumer need of citizens in food and other basic materials, so the dependence was almost entirely on imports for the commercial private sector and from different origins, and successive governments could not control of internal trade and regulation of foreign trade and weak control over illegal trade and informal border crossings, which led to the impact of the monetary and commercial market and the prices of food and necessary materials for citizens at high rates during the years 2021 and 2022, so this indicator was the most prominent challenge that faced monetary policy and directly affected the stability of the exchange rate, which led the Central Bank to take many measures in cooperation with the government in 2023 to regulate foreign trade and control over foreign remittances.
And regularity in the global financial and banking system by developing the electronic platform and working on preparing and launching a new strategy for reform and banking classification in all its basic episodes at the level of internal and external banking transactions, the most prominent of which is securing the US dollar for large and registered traders and for each trader, regardless of his classification at the official price through the platform exclusively, which helped to reduce prices.
This was achieved through the analysis of the annual inflation rate indicators for 2023, which was published by the Central Bank compared to the annual inflation rates for 2022 achieved in Iraq and in regional countries, where it is clear from official data that the annual inflation rate reached 3.7% in 2023 and 4.4% in 2022, and that most other countries with unstable economies reached Inflation rates have very high rates, reaching 80.2% in Turkey, 117.4% in Sudan, 40.0% in Iran, 9.3%, 9.0% and 5.0% respectively in Egypt, and ranged in the Gulf countries with stable economies and rich in oil between (2.4-4.8%).
Maintaining the general level of prices of goods and services is currently working to achieve other goals, which are the stability of the exchange rate and the maintenance of foreign reserves covering the local currency in circulation and imports, which exceeded 100 billion dollars.
Therefore, the economic results and outputs confirm that the policies and measures carried out by the Central Bank this year have achieved an important goal of achieving stability in the monetary system, which is an important step in achieving the other objectives of monetary policy.
