Thank you Chair for the floor

Thank you Chair for the floor. I want to thank Mr. Trabinski for his helpful Buff statement [and his opening remarks this morning], and staff for the well-written paper. We have issued a gray, and I will focus on following points. First, low fiscal deficit and public debt levels provide enough policy space for supporting households and firms. Therefore, we are of the view that fiscal policy should continue to support economic activity until the pandemic effects subside. Moreover, phasing out the generalized subsidies and adopting more targeted subsidies is essential to improving the quality of public spending in the long term and supports the households and firms that are disproportionately affected by the pandemic in the short term. Second, indexing public wages to inflation makes fiscal policy procyclical, and exacerbates business cycles. Economy-wide productivity growth should be taken into account in public wage adjustments. Third, [As mentioned by Mr. Azal, Mr. Fuentes, and Mr. Zhang in their grays], A credible reform of the exchange rate regime is critical to improving competitiveness and addressing the underlying external imbalances. Also,   adopting a more flexible exchange rate regime would enable the economy to become more resilient to external shocks. Finally, Structural reforms are needed to reduce the  imbalances and distortions in the goods, financial, and labor markets. Moreover, putting in place a social safety net is a prerequisite for ensuring public support for the implementation of structural reforms. I stop here and wish the Turkmen authorities and people all the success. Thank you, Chair.