Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves have shown a surprising rise by $276 million to $3.193 billion in the week ending on February 10, according to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).
The bank said that commercial banks held a net reserve of $5.5bn, taking the total foreign reserves to $8.7bn.
The central bank had been seeing a steady decline in foreign exchange reserves due to the economic crisis.
In the previous week, Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves had fallen below $3bn on account of external debt payments.
Ratings agency Fitch had downgraded Pakistan’s foreign-currency issuer default rating (IDR) to ‘CCC-’, denoting a very high level of default risk.
As part of a $7 billion bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pakistan has agreed to raise electricity tariff and petrol prices that had resulted in the release of a $1.2 billion.
The government has added a PKR 3.39 per unit surcharge on power tariff, in addition to PKR 3.21 raise per unit every quarter.
Petrol price was hiked by PKR 22.20 to up to PKR 272 per litre (INR 1 equals PKR 3.21), Geo News reported citing a release from the Finance Division.
Following these measures, the Pakistani Rupee too has gained against the dollar, rising to 264.24 for a US dollar on Thursday, up from 270.17 on February 13.
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