Seven Economic Issues That Should Be Considered By Algeria’s Next President

Economists unanimously agree that 7 major economic issues will be on the table of the President of the Republic, who is expected to be elected next Thursday, represented in appointing a government of competencies, recovering the looted funds, integrating the parallel market and continuing to dismantle the corruption files by telling the people and addressing the wage deficit and the problem of purchasing power, and managing new incomes that protect Algeria from external borrowing or return to printing money and issuing a supplementary financial law.

Economy experts emphasize that Algeria does not suffer from a scarcity of funds or a liquidity crisis, and the evidence is that opening one corruption file – the scandals of auto-installation factories – revealed the thefts of thousands of billions.

Economist Farhat Ait Ali told Echorouk that the next challenge for the new president will be the release of a heavy economic program, and able to get Algeria out of the economic crisis, and this will not come according to him before appointing a government of competencies to skip the lines of implementing this program, in the near future, and even before legislative elections are held, then after passing through the complex economic files, the first is to complete the folding of corruption cases that are open at the level of courts and confiscate the property of “corrupt” businessmen and return them to the treasury, then re-consideration of the national currency “the dinar” and the integration of the parallel market in the official market.

According to the same expert, once the new president enters the Mouradia Palace, he will be bound by the beginning of the supplementary finance law articles line for the year 2020, and he is expected to address all the imbalances that are caused by the decisions which were included in the financial laws for the years 2009, 2010 and 2018.

For his part, the economist Kamal Rezig, told Echorouk that the most important file that the elected president should open after December 12 is the purchasing power of the Algerian citizen, who has witnessed a sharp decline in recent years, which may lead to severe social crisis, calling for finding of quick solutions to the situation, as he talked about the file of wages that are still not commensurate with the social situation of the citizen, as consumer prices notice a continuous rise at a time when wages and salaries remain the same.

Kamel Rezig also spoke of the need to reassure local and foreign investment and review the support policy that has cost the government an annual amount of DZD 20 billion dinars, while denying any financial crisis in Algeria, saying, “The funds are available. We need neither printing nor debt, so the cover that is revealed from a single corruption file, which is the auto-installation plant, has revealed huge sums of tens of thousands of billions.

In a related context, the economic expert, Abdelkader Bariche, considers that the file of the black market and the recovery of the sleeping money outside the official channels from banks and posts, should be the first file that will be opened by the newly elected president at El Mouradia Palace after December 12, and he also called on the next president to openly speak to the Algerians about the reality of the economic situation, saying “The Algerians are not even aware of the real figure of the remaining cash reserves and the figure of $51 billion is doubtful”.