Policy Papers
2014
June 25, 2014
2014 Spillover Report
Description:
Global spillovers have entered a new phase. With crisis-related spillovers and risks fading, changing growth patterns are the main source of spillovers in the global economy at this juncture. Two key trends are highly relevant here. First, signs of self-sustaining recovery in some advanced economies indicate that the unwinding of exceptional monetary accommodation will proceed and lead to a tightening of global financial conditions in the coming years. An uneven recovery, though, suggests normalization will proceed at different times in different countries, with possible spillover implications. Second, growth in emerging markets is slowing on a broad basis since its precrisis peak and can carry noticeable spillover effects at the global level.
Model code and programs used for the spillover simulations can be made available. Data used for the empirical analysis can be made available unless restricted by copyright or confidentiality issues.
Catalogue of all charts from the 2014 Spillover Report
June 18, 2014
Update on the Fiscal Transparency Initiative
Description: This paper provides an update on staff’s work on a new Fiscal Transparency Code (FTC) and experiences with the initial pilot Fiscal Transparency Evaluations (FTE), the ground work for which was laid in a 2012 paper “Fiscal Transparency, Accountability, and Risk.” Both are part of ongoing efforts by the Fiscal Affairs Department, in cooperation with other departments, to strengthen the Fund’s fiscal surveillance and capacity building. The new FTC and FTE reflect the lessons of the recent crisis, incorporate developments in international standards, and build on feedback from consultations with stakeholders.
June 11, 2014
Sovereign Asset-Liability Management - Guidance for Resource-Rich Economies
Description: Ample natural resource revenues create both opportunities and challenges for a sovereign to transform its natural resources into well-managed financial assets. Hence, inter-temporal smoothing of revenue and consumption/investment moves to the center stage of macroeconomic policies. The questions arising from natural resource wealth accumulation are becoming more pressing for many countries, given the need to achieve intergenerational equity in a context where commodity prices may not continue their upward trajectory of the past decade. Addressing these questions requires a flexible sovereign asset-liability management (SALM) framework that integrates various macroeconomic and financial trade-offs with the aim of containing financial risk to the sovereign balance sheet. The framework and policy advice aims to guide policymakers across different institutions in weighing those trade-offs.
June 11, 2014
Statement by the Managing Director on the Independent Evaluation Office Report on Recurring Issues from a Decade of Evaluation: Lessons for the IMF
Description: The Managing Director welcomes the IEO's novel report, which identifies recurring issues from past evaluations and assesses progress in addressing them. The report's focus on organizational silos, attention to risks and uncertainty, country and institutional context, evenhandedness, and Executive Board guidance and oversight is appropriate given their relevance and importance for the effectiveness and credibility of IMF operations.
June 3, 2014
Proposed New Grouping in WEO Country Classifications: Low-Income Developing Countries
Description: This note develops a definition of a new category of countries (Low Income Developing Countries (acronym: LIDCs)) that can be deployed to (a) facilitate enhanced coverage of low income country issues in the Fund’s flagship products and (b) serve as a standardized definition of the “low income country” universe in staff analytical work.1 While use of the proposed definition in analytical work would be encouraged, it would not be required.
June 2, 2014
Cross-Border Bank Resolution - Recent Developments
Description: Developing an effective framework for cross-border resolution is a key priority in international regulatory reform. Large bank failures during the global financial crisis brought home the lack of adequate tools for resolving “too-big-to-fail” institutions. In cross-border cases, misaligned incentives and lack of robust mechanisms for resolution and cross-border cooperation left some country authorities with little choice but to take unilateral actions, which contributed to the high fiscal costs of the crisis and resulted in disorderly resolution in some cases.
May 30, 2014
Statement by the Managing Director on the Work Program of the Executive Board - Executive Board Meeting - June 11, 2014
Description: The Global Policy Agenda (GPA) presented to the IMFC in April 2014 identified a range of actions needed to transform the modest, uneven, and fragile recovery into more rapid, balanced, and sustainable growth. These actions included policies to manage monetary normalization and the associated policy spillovers and spillbacks; reforms to ensure robust growth while reducing vulnerabilities; and steps to facilitate external rebalancing. The GPA also outlined how the Fund would support the membership through assessments and policy advice provided in bilateral and multilateral surveillance, capacity building, and financial support.
May 23, 2014
The Fund’s Lending Framework and Sovereign Debt - Preliminary Considerations
Description: As a follow-up to the Executive Board's May 2013 discussion, this paper considers a possible direction for reform of the Fund's lending framework in the context of sovereign debt vulnerabilities. The primary focus of this paper relates to the Fund's exceptional access framework, since it is in this context that the Fund will most likely have to make the difficult judgment as to whether the member's problems can be resolved with or without a debt restructuring. The objective of the preliminary approaches set forth in this paper is to reduce the costs of crisis resolution for both creditors and debtors—relative to the alternatives—thereby benefitting the overall system. These ideas are market-based and their eventual implementation would require meaningful consultation with creditors.