Israel will make tomorrow her regular semi-annual payment to the U. S. Government Export-Import Bank, in an amount of $7,800,000 consisting of $5,800,000 on account of principal and $2,000,000 interest. This payment will bring the amount repaid by Israel in 1957 to a total of $15,500,000 of which four million dollars was interest.
To date, Israel has paid the Export-Import Bank a total of $54,500,000 of which $27,000,000 was principal and $26,800,000 interest. These payments are made on account of the $135,000,000 loan extended by the Export-Import Bank to the State of Israel in 1949 and 1950. The proceeds of the U.S. loan were invested in carefully prepared and approved projects in agriculture and irrigation, industry and public utilities, including electricity, transportation and port facilities, telecommunications and housing.
A mission of the Bank has recently returned from Israel where it had occasion to observe the effective use which Israel had made of this eight-year-old loan. The outstanding achievement of this Export-Import Bank development loan is that it sparked considerably larger investments in all areas of Israel’s economic life, and thus contributed beyond the measure of its dollar value to the progress of the country
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.