Syria—IMF Staff Concludes Staff Visit to Damascus

IMF News, June 10, 2025

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A staff team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), led by Ron van Rooden, visited Damascus from June 1–5, 2025, to assess the economic and financial conditions in the country, discuss the authorities’ policy priorities, and develop a roadmap for capacity building to assist the formulation and implementation of economic policies.
The visit was the IMF staff team’s first to Syria since 2009 and the first in 16 years.
Press Release No. 25/188; end-of-mission press release dated June 10, 2025.

Years of conflict have:
- Caused immense human suffering and reduced the economy to a fraction of its former size.
- Resulted in some six million people fleeing the country, mostly to neighboring countries, and an additional seven million displaced internally.
- Led to plummeting output, sharply fallen real incomes, and high poverty rates.
- Weakened state institutions, disrupted delivery of basic services, and damaged or destroyed large parts of the country’s infrastructure.
Humanitarian and reconstruction needs are described as very large, with great urgency to address these challenges and achieve a sustainable economic recovery, including to absorb the increasing number of returning refugees.

Adopt a budget for the remainder of 2025 that:
- Identifies available domestic and external resources.
- Ensures that priority spending needs are met, including the government payroll, basic health and education services, and assistance to the most vulnerable segments of the population.
Improve revenue mobilization by:
- Modernizing the tax and customs regime.
- Strengthening tax and customs administration and bringing both under the purview of the finance ministry.
Strengthen public financial management to improve budget execution and monitoring.
Empower the central bank to ensure price stability, restore confidence in the national currency, and adopt a monetary policy framework suited to achieve this.
Rehabilitate payment and banking systems and enhance the Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime to:
- Improve transaction efficiency.
- Rebuild confidence in banks and restart financial intermediation.
- Allow reconnection with the international financial system.
Address immediate obstacles to market-based private sector development and improve the investment climate.
Enhance data collection, processing and dissemination, separate from economic planning, to ensure adequate data to support policy formulation and assessment.

The authorities will need strong international support, including:
- Financial support at highly concessional terms—given Syria’s financing and external sustainability constraints.
- Extensive capacity development assistance to strengthen economic institutions and upgrade outdated technologies and systems.
Despite weakened administrative capacity from years of conflict and displacement, staff at the finance ministry and central bank demonstrated strong commitment and solid understanding.
IMF staff will coordinate closely with other development partners in formulating the roadmap and ensuring effective support, taking into account constraints in absorptive capacity.

IMF staff is developing a detailed roadmap for policy and capacity building priorities for key economic institutions, notably the finance ministry, central bank, and statistics agency.
The mission reaffirmed the IMF’s commitment to supporting Syria in efforts to rehabilitate the economy, meet urgent humanitarian needs, and rebuild essential institutions and infrastructure.

The staff team met with Minister of Finance Yisr Barnieh, Governor of the Central Bank of Syria Abdulkader Husrieh, other senior officials, and representatives of the private sector and state-owned banks.
The staff team expressed gratitude to the authorities for candid and constructive discussions and for their warm hospitality during the mission.

Source: Press Release No. 25/188 — Syria—IMF Staff Concludes Staff Visit to Damascus (June 10, 2025).