Aid To Pakistan Consortium

Aid To Pakistan Consortium The Aid to Pakistan Consortium was formed in 1960 to lend coherence
to the policies pursued and to programs and projects financed by the donor community. The group
met in Paris every spring to discuss the country's economic plans for the following financial year. It
also reviewed important development issues on the basis of the documentation prepared by the
World Bank and the government of Pakistan. The outcome of the consortium meeting was issued in
the form of a comm uniqu? that expressed the collective impression of its members of the economic
performance of Pakistan, the country's mid-term development objectives, and the amount of foreign
flows the country required in order to close the "foreign exchange gap." The communiqu? usually
announced an amount that the consortium members were willing to pledge to Pakistan for the
following year. The Consortium meeting was chaired by the World Bank vice president in charge of
the region that included Pakistan. The donor countries that normally attended the Paris meeting
included all bilateral and multilateral donors active in the country. The number of delegations
attending the meeting increased over time, but the volume of assistance provided peaked in the late
1980s. In the 1980s, the war in Afghanistan bestowed the status of a "front-line state" on Pakistan,
and the Western donors were willing to provide generous amounts of financial assistance to the
country to encourage it to resist the Soviet expansion into South Asia. The end of the war against the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union reduced
Pakistan's geopolitical importance and with it the generosity of the donor community. Over the years,
the bilateral donors attending the Paris meetings included: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the
United States. In addition to the World Bank, the Consortium also had a number of multilateral
donors, including: the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Islamic
Development Bank, the United Nations Development Program, the International Fund for Agricultural
Development, the International Finance Corporation, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, the Saudi Fund for Development, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
and the World Food Program. In the 1990s, the members of the Consortium began to put pressure on
Pakistan to invest more in social development and to reduce its budget deficit. Some members of the
group also began to take note of Pakistan's high defense expenditure, arguing that by committing
large amounts of resources to the military, Pakistan was starving a number of sectors of vital
investments. In 2000, the World Bank, in agreement with Pakistan, replaced the Consortium with the
Pakistan Forum, chaired by the finance minister and attended by the entire aid community interested
in assisting the country.