Press Release No. 14/473

Press Release: IMF and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Collaborate Toward Improving Transparency of Natural Resources Revenues

October 16, 2014

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) are collaborating to improve transparency and consistency of government revenues from natural resources. The effort is based on a framework that the IMF’s Statistics Department has developed in close consultation with other stakeholders, including the EITI, to collect data and report information on such revenues. It is based on the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014 (GFSM 2014), which is the internationally accepted standard for compiling fiscal statistics.

Louis Marc Ducharme, Director of the IMF’s Statistics Department, noted: “The public availability of reliable data on government revenues that facilitates fiscal analysis in resource-rich countries is an important objective of the IMF’s Statistics Department. This collaboration with the EITI will contribute significantly to reaching this objective.”

Jonas Moberg, Head of the EITI International Secretariat, said: “Improving public understanding of government revenues from natural resources is a core principle of the EITI. This collaboration with the IMF will improve consistency and quality of the EITI data across countries.”

The EITI resource transparency standard is currently being implemented in 48 countries. It requires extensive disclosure of information from the country’s natural resource sector, enabling the public to better judge whether the sector is well managed. The governments of the EITI countries, as well as other resource-rich countries, will be able to use the new framework to present their revenue data in an analytically relevant and cross-country comparable format.

The new framework has just been tested in Norway. It will be tested in five other EITI countries with support of the Managing Natural Resource Wealth Topical Trust Fund. Additional information on the new framework can be found at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/gfs/manual/comp.htm.