Policy Papers
2015
October 6, 2015
Arab Countries in Transition - Economic Outlook and Key Challenges
Description: The Arab Countries in Transition (ACTs) have had diverging trajectories over the past year and face an uncertain outlook.1 Improvements in the European economy, lower oil prices, and some progress on the policy front have provided tailwinds to growth, which is expected to pick up significantly in Egypt and Morocco. At the same time, unemployment remains high. Moreover, several of the ACTs have also suffered from intensifying and spreading conflicts that cause widespread human suffering and sizeable economic challenges. Libya and Yemen are directly affected, while spillovers from these conflicts and the civil wars in Iraq and Syria weigh on Jordan and Tunisia, as well as other countries in the region (e.g., Lebanon, Djibouti), Turkey and Europe. These spillovers come most prominently in the form of large refugee flows, deteriorating security, and pressures on economic infrastructures and labor markets. All these factors add urgency to the need in the Arab countries to strengthen economic resilience and address long-standing sources of inequity and exclusion. Coordinated and scaled-up support from the international community will be also critical in stabilizing conditions in the region, addressing the refugee crisis, and securing a more promising economic future for the ACTs in this challenging environment.
September 29, 2015
The Acting Chair’s Summing Up - Independent Evaluation Office—Self Evaluation at the IMF—An IEO Assessment - Executive Board Meeting 15/89 - September 18, 2015
Description: Executive Directors welcomed the report by the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) on self-evaluation at the IMF, the accompanying statement on the report by the Managing Director, and the IEO’s response. They were encouraged by the report’s findings that there is considerable self-evaluation at the IMF; that such self-evaluation is generally of high quality; and that it contributes usefully to reforms in policies and operations. At the same time, they also noted the finding that there are gaps and weaknesses in the Fund’s self-evaluation. Against this background, Directors considered the recommendations of the report to adopt an overall policy for self-evaluation; conduct self-assessments for every IMF-supported program; explicitly set out a plan for how policies and operations will be self-evaluated; and better disseminate lessons from self-evaluation. In this context, many Directors supported strengthening the current mechanisms for self-evaluation. More broadly, Directors agreed on the importance of having a clearly articulated approach to self-evaluation that builds on current processes, takes due account of resource constraints, and adapts over time to changing circumstances. Directors also concurred on the need to better disseminate lessons from self-evaluation. The implementation plan would be a first opportunity to reflect on how best to carry these considerations forward.
September 29, 2015
Managing Director’s Global Policy Agenda to the International Monetary and Financial Committee
Description:
The Executive Summary is also available in:
Arabic , Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.
The membership is facing a rapidly changing and uncertain world. The United States is poised to raise interest rates amid ongoing recovery, China’s expected slowdown as it rebalances growth is creating larger-than-anticipated spillovers, and commodity producers are facing the end of a long cycle of high commodity prices. These necessary transitions pose challenges, particularly for emerging and low-income developing countries, where prospects have dwindled the most.
Policymakers are increasingly grappling with difficult policy trade-offs. Faced with limited room to maneuver and the need to adapt to new realities, what relative weight should be placed on supporting demand and current activity, on reducing financial risks as financial conditions tighten, and on implementing urgently needed structural reforms to revive future growth?
Policies need to reflect country circumstances and coalesce into a new multilateralism. Mutually reinforcing policies are needed to support growth today, invest in resilience and safeguard financial stability, and implement the structural reforms needed for a sustainable and inclusive future. Policies should reflect member circumstances and also add up to a coherent whole—to ensure that demand is created not substituted, market resilience is enhanced not circumvented, and that structural reforms are enacted not delayed. Cooperation is vital in areas such as the global financial safety net, trade, climate change, international taxation, sustainable development goals (SDGs), and demographic transitions and migration. The Fund will support the membership at this juncture. The Fund has both the universal membership and mandate to address growth and economic stability issues at the national and global levels. To support the membership most effectively, the Fund will focus on three priorities that best reflect this new AIM:
• Agility. Advice will focus on policies to support members cope with evolving transitions—respond to tighter and more volatile financial conditions and implement effective macro-structural reforms. The lending framework will deliver financial assistance quickly where needed. Delivery of technical assistance and training will be enhanced by greater use of online tools.
• Integration. In the face of growing policy trade-offs, the Fund will support its members by better integrating policy advice across sectors, embracing evolving priorities, promoting integration of global, regional, and bilateral safety nets, and better leveraging synergies between surveillance and capacity building.
• Member-Focused. With policy concerns evolving rapidly and advice becoming more dependent on country-specifics, the Fund will deepen its engagement with members, better deliver its knowledge, and ensure faster feedback to policymakers. The Fund continues to refine its core work—surveillance, lending, and capacity building—and to attain greater intellectual and cultural diversity to respond to this changing global environment and its corresponding policy challenges. To further improve services to the membership, Fund activities need to be fully supported by adequate financial, human, budgetary, and technological resources.
September 29, 2015
Provisional Agenda for the Thirty-Second Meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee
Description: The following is the provisional agenda for the Thirty-Second Meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, which is to be convened in Lima, Peru, October 9-10, 2015.
September 24, 2015
Safeguards Assessments Policy - External Expert Panel's Advisory Report
Description: This report by the external expert panel (“the panel”) examines the effectiveness and appropriateness of the safeguards assessments policy in the five years since its last review in 2010. In addition to expressing an opinion on the effectiveness and appropriateness of the safeguards assessment policy, the panel also makes recommendations to the Executive Board for its consideration to improve and optimize the benefits to be garnered from the safeguards assessment policy. The panel’s opinion is based on (i) consultations with key stakeholders, including central bank authorities, IMF Executive Directors’ offices, Fund and World Bank staff; (ii) examination of safeguards assessment and other Fund-specific documents; and (iii) study of international reference materials.
September 23, 2015
Safeguards Assessments - Review of Experience
Description: This paper reviews experience with the safeguards assessment policy since the last review in 2010. The policy is subject to periodic reviews by the Executive Board. The policy’s main objective is to mitigate risks of misuse of Fund resources and misreporting of monetary data under Fund arrangements. Consistent with past reviews, an external panel of experts provided an independent perspective on the implementation of the policy.
September 18, 2015
Implementation Plan in Response to the Board-Endorsed Recommendations for the IEO Evaluation of IMF Forecasts - Process, Quality, and Country Perspective
Description:
This paper sets out Management’s response to the Independent Evaluation Office’s (IEO) evaluation of IMF Forecasts: Process, Quality, and Country Perspectives.
The implementation plan proposes specific actions to address the five recommendations that received broad support from the Executive Board, namely
(i) maintaining the practice of commissioning external evaluations of IMF forecasts,
(ii) enhancing the processes and incentives for learning from past forecast performance,
(iii) extending guidance to desk economists on forecasting methodologies,
(iv) publishing a description of the WEO forecasting process, and
(iv) improving the public availability of data related to forecasts and outturns.
Several of the proposed actions to address the Board-endorsed IEO recommendations have already been implemented following the Board discussion, while the implementation of some other actions is underway. This paper also explains how implementation will be monitored.
September 18, 2015
Implementation Plan in Response to the Board-Endorsed Recommendations for the IEO Evaluation of Recurring Issues from a Decade of Evaluation—Lessons for the IMF
Description:
This paper sets out Management’s response to the Independent Evaluation Office’s (IEO) evaluation of Recurring Issues from a Decade of Evaluation: Lessons for the IMF.
The implementation plan proposes specific actions to address the recommendation supported by the Executive Board, namely preparing a high-level status report to monitor the progress the IMF has made in addressing recurring issues within two years, possibly followed by similar reports every five years thereafter.
September 18, 2015
Progress Report on Inclusion of Enhanced Contractual Provisions in International Sovereign Bond Contracts
Description: As part of the Fund’s ongoing work on sovereign debt restructuring, in October 2014 the Executive Board endorsed the inclusion of key features of enhanced pari passu provisions and collective action clauses (CACs) in new international sovereign bonds.1 Specifically, the Executive Board endorsed the use of: (i) a modified pari passu clause that explicitly excludes the obligation to effect ratable payments and (ii) an enhanced CAC with a menu of voting procedures, including a “single-limb” voting procedure that enables bonds to be restructured on the basis of a single vote across all affected instruments, a two-limb aggregated voting procedure and a series-by-series voting procedure.