Policy Papers
2016
June 8, 2016
Statement by the Managing Director on the Work Program of the Executive Board - Executive Board Meeting - June 8, 2016
Description: The Managing Director’s Global Policy Agenda (GPA) presented to the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) in April called on member countries to reinforce their commitment to strong, sustainable, inclusive, job-rich, and more balanced global growth and to employ a three-pronged approach with monetary, fiscal, and structural actions (Figure 1). The global economy has been impaired by growth that has been too slow for too long, but it can get back on a stronger and safer track with a more forceful and balanced policy mix. Building on the approach of being agile, integrated, and member-focused, the GPA outlined how the Fund would support members in crafting a better policy mix toward durable global growth. The Fund would assist by clarifying the contours of available policy space, providing more tailored financial support and capacity development, and continuing to address new challenges.
June 7, 2016
Strengthening the Framework for Post Program Monitoring
Description: Post-Program Monitoring (PPM) is an important part of the Fund’s safeguards architecture. It provides a framework for closer engagement with members that have substantial outstanding Fund credit but are no longer in a program relationship, and helps identify risks and provide advice on policies that will assist these members in repaying the Fund. The significant expansion in Fund credit since the global financial crisis, much of it through medium-term financing of members with high access levels, puts a premium on this form of monitoring. The design and implementation of the current policy can be strengthened. Read More
June 3, 2016
Guidance Note on the Assessment of Reserve Adequacy and Related Considerations
Description:
This note provides operational guidance to staff on reserve adequacy discussions in the IMF’s bilateral and multilateral surveillance. It is based on the views presented in the policy paper Assessing Reserve Adequacy—Specific Proposals and the related Board discussion. The note addresses key issues related to Staff’s advice on the assessment of the adequacy of reserves and related items, including answering the following questions:
May 13, 2016
Group of Twenty - Reinvigorating Trade to Support Growth: A Path Forward
Description:
Reinvigorating trade integration should be a key component of the global policy agenda to boost growth. Trade policy’s new frontiers such as services, regulatory cooperation, and trade and investment complementarities carry high potential to bolster efficiency and productivity. But with governments differing on whether to continue the WTO Doha Round, there is an urgent need to identify a path for the global trading system in today’s more complex trade policy landscape. A long interregnum without a path forward would risk fragmenting the global trade system and undermining its governance.
Tackling trade policy issues important to the global economy may require flexible approaches to multilateral negotiations, including modalities such as plurilaterals.
Enhanced coherence efforts are also needed to ensure that regional trade agreements and multilateralism coexist productively.
May 4, 2016
Analyzing and Managing Fiscal Risks - Best Practices
Description:
Comprehensive analysis and management of fiscal risks can help ensure sound fiscal public finances and macroeconomic stability. This has been underscored by the global financial crisis and the more recent collapse in commodity prices, which starkly illustrate the vulnerability of public finances to risk. Indeed, over the past quarter century, governments experienced on average an adverse fiscal shock of 6 percent of GDP once every 12 years, with some of the largest stemming from financial crises.
Countries need a more complete understanding of these potential threats to their fiscal position. Existing fiscal risk disclosure and analysis practices tend to be incomplete, fragmented, and qualitative in nature. A more comprehensive and integrated assessment of the potential shocks to government finances, in the form of a fiscal stress test, can help policymakers simulate the effects of shocks to their central forecasts and their implications for government solvency, liquidity, and financing needs. Comprehensive, reliable, and timely fiscal data covering all public entities, stocks, and flows are a necessary foundation for such analysis.
Countries should also enhance their capacity to mitigate and manage fiscal risks. Fiscal risk management practices are often blunt, ad hoc, and too focused on imposing limits on the creation of exposures. Countries need to expand their toolkits for fiscal risk management and adopt the use of instruments to transfer, share, or provision for risks. In doing so, countries need to weigh the possible benefits from reducing their exposure to shocks against the financial and other costs of the policies that may be needed.
Finally, countries should make greater use of probabilistic forecasting methods when setting long-run objectives and medium-term targets for fiscal policy. The paper illustrates how simple probabilistic tools can be used to map the uncertainty around medium-term trajectories for public debt. In combination with fiscal stress tests, these tools can provide valuable information regarding the probabilities that a country will stay within the debt ceilings embedded in their fiscal rules.
The Fund is playing an important role in supporting improvements in fiscal risk analysis and management among its members. This includes technical assistance in constructing public sector balance sheets; developing institutions and capacity to identify specific fiscal risks and to quantify their potential impact; undertaking fiscal stress tests; and integrating risks into the design of medium-term fiscal targets.
May 2, 2016
Investment and Growth in the Arab World - A Scoping Note
Description: Enhancing public and private investment, but also ensuring that this translates into higher growth and employment, have long been key policy challenges in Arab countries. Reflecting an improvement in policies and global conditions, investment rates in Arab countries have increased over the past couple of decades. In spite of this—and notwithstanding significant differences across the region—investment has on average been somewhat weaker than in peer countries and less effective at generating growth. Private investment, particularly foreign direct investment (FDI), has underperformed significantly. And while public capital spending has benefited from high oil prices in resource–rich countries, it has continued to lag in oil importers...
April 29, 2016
Economic Diversification in Oil-Exporting Arab Countries
Description:
countries face similar challenges to create jobs and foster more inclusive growth. The current environment of likely durable low oil prices has exacerbated these challenges. Greater economic diversification would unlock job-creating growth, increase resilience to oil price volatility and improve prospects for future generations. Macro-economic stability and supportive regulatory and institutional frameworks are key prerequisites for economic diversification...
April 14, 2016
Provisional Agenda for the Thirty-Third Meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee
Description: Provisional agenda for the Thirty-Third Meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, which convenes in Washington, DC, April 16, 2016.
April 12, 2016
Case Studies on Managing Government Compensation and Employment - Institutions, Policies, and Reform Challenges
Description: This supplement presents country case studies reviewing country experiences with managing wage bill pressures, which are the basis for the compensation and employment reform lessons identified in the main paper. The selection of countries for the case studies reflects past studies carried out by either the IMF or the World Bank in the context of technical assistance or bilateral surveillance (Table 1). These studies provide important insights into the different sources of wage bill pressures as well as the reform challenges governments have faced when addressing these pressures over the short and medium term. The studies cover 20 countries, including five advanced economies, six countries from sub-Saharan Africa, two countries in developing Asia, one country in the Middle East and North Africa, three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and three countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS. The structure of each case study is similar, with each study starting with a presentation of the institutional coverage and framework for setting and managing the wage bill; a description of employment and compensation levels, including their comparison with the private sector; and a discussion of the challenges that motivated the need for reforms and, when applicable, the reforms implemented and lessons derived from these.
April 8, 2016
Review of the Fund's Income Position for FY 2016 and FY 2017-2018
Description:
The Fund’s total net income for FY 2016 including surcharges is projected at about SDR 1.0 billion or some SDR 0.15 billion higher than expected in April 2015. Lending income continues to be the main source of income and is in line with April 2015 estimates. Investment income has fallen reflecting the decline in equity markets that exceeded the modest returns on fixed income securities. As a result of the 5-yearly review of key actuarial assumptions, the IAS 19 adjustment (relating to reporting of employee benefits) is expected to contribute about SDR 0.3 billion to net income in FY 2016.
The paper recommends that GRA net income of SDR 1.1 billion for FY 2016 (which excludes projected losses of the gold endowment), be placed equally to the special and general reserve. After the placement to reserves, precautionary balances are projected to reach SDR 15.2 billion at the end of FY 2016.
Following the completion of the Board’s review of the investment strategy for the Fixed-Income Subaccount, the paper further proposes to transfer currencies equivalent to the increase of the Fund’s reserves for FY 2014 and FY 2015 (totaling SDR 2.6 billion) and FY 2016 (estimated at SDR 1.1 billion), from the GRA to the Investment Account.
The paper proposes that the margin for the rate of charge be set at 100 basis points for the two years FY 2017 and FY 2018. This follows a comprehensive review of the underlying factors relevant for the establishment of the margin this year and also takes into account the impact of the inclusion of the renminbi in the SDR basket on Fund income and borrowing costs. The projections for FY 2017 and FY 2018 point to a net income position of SDR 1 billion and SDR 0.7 billion, respectively. These projections are subject to considerable uncertainty and are sensitive to a number of assumptions.