Paris Club

Paris Club

News: The Paris Club, an informal group of creditor nations, will provide financial assurances to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Sri Lanka’s debt.

About:
 The Paris Club is an informal group of creditor nations whose objective is to find workable solutions to payment problems faced by debtor nations.
 The Paris Club has 22 permanent members, including most of the western European and Scandinavian nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
 The group is organized around the principles that each debtor nation be treated case by case, with consensus, conditionality, solidarity, and comparability of treatment.
 The Paris Club stresses the informal nature of its existence. As an informal group, it has no official statutes and no formal inception date, although its first meeting with a debtor nation was in 1956, with Argentina.

Member Countries:
 Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
 All 22 are members of the group called Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Recent Developments:
 According to its official website, Paris Club has reached 478 agreements with 102 different debtor countries.
 The Paris group countries dominated bilateral lending in the last century, but their importance has receded over the last two decades or so with the emergence of China as the world’s biggest bilateral lender.
 In Sri Lanka’s case, for instance, India, China, and Japan are the largest bilateral creditors. Sri Lanka’s debt to China is 52% of its bilateral debt, 19.5% to Japan, and 12% to India.