MOSCOW A top IMF team has left Moscow without agreeing to a new program of cooperation that would open the way for Russia to restructure its massive Paris Club debts, AFP quoted the fund as saying on Tuesday.
"Progress was made in a number of areas and outstanding issues were clarified for further consideration," the International Monetary Fund said in a statement.
"Work will now continue on both sides in the weeks ahead in preparation for the next round of discussions when this work is sufficiently advanced." The IMF and Russia had agreed a program in July 1999 allowing for loans of 4.5 billion (5.23 billion euros), but the IMF suspended it two months later because Russia was not moving fast enough on structural reform.
Russia inherited a backlog of debt when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the country's debt to its public creditors, who make up the Paris Club, has risen to $48 billion.
It is also due to make interest payments of $1.7 billion on past IMF loans next year.
Banking on a restructuring agreement, Russia has made no allowance in next year's budget for the $3.3 billion it must theoretically repay to the Paris Club in the course of 2001.
So far, the government has been rescued by high world oil prices, which have galvanized the Russian economy which is reported to have grown at a rate of 7.5 percent in the first half of 2000 -- the best ever post-Soviet result.
Yet Western resolve has at the same time hardened for Russia to honor its international commitments.
And on Monday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development sounded a warning bell by predicting that Russia's economic growth would slow to 4.0 percent in the years 2001 and 2002.
Moscow economic analysts and investors watched carefully for the IMF announcement, predicting that failure to strike an agreement could significantly hurt the standing of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's cabinet.
A delay "would impair Russian markets' potential to be first off the blocks just as soon as global conditions become somewhat less adverse for emerging markets as a whole," Christopher Granville of the United Financial Group Investment House wrote in a note.
"Second, a delay would highlight the failure of the Kasyanov government to establish the administrative cohesion necessary to counter the internal force of Russian bureaucracy." The fund's statement said it held nearly two weeks of talks with a Russian delegation headed by Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, a liberal whose own political standing has been shaken by harsh recent criticism from President Vladimir Putin.
The IMF-Russia talks first focused on short term macroeconomic policies that would help the economy grow without seeing a return of inflation, which had been forecast at a relatively stable 16 percent for this year.