The EBRD features prominently in a new video which celebrates the success of the Joint International Financial Institution (IFI) Action Plan in helping Romania recover from the financial crisis.
The video, ‘Romania: Coordinated, Counter-Cyclical Crisis Response’, has been produced by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), one of the EBRD’s many partners in assisting Romania and its neighbours during the crisis.
The Joint IFI Action Plan, developed as part of the Vienna Initiative, pumped €24.5 billion into Central and South Eastern Europe to support financial stability and boost lending to the region’s economy’s real sector.
The European Investment Bank (EIB), the World Bank and the EBRD have since committed another €30 billion to the region this year and next.
The progress of the new Joint IFI Action Plan’s will be a focus of next week’s annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC.
Cooperation between different IFIs emerges as one of the main themes of the IFC video, which documents the way Romania, then a fast growing, middle- income country and new member of the EU, was hit by the crisis in 2008 but then recovered.
“The EBRD and IFC have cooperated extremely well over the years,” James Hyslop, the EBRD’s Director for Romania, says in the video. “This is borne out by the large number of transactions we’ve done together and also in terms of policy dialogue.
“A joint message from the EBRD and IFC is a much more powerful tool and a much more powerful voice than our own voice. Coordination and cooperation are much stronger than competition”.
