How To Notes
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2025
January 30, 2025
How to Measure the Monetary Stance
This note provides a conceptual framework to organize discussions of the appropriateness of the monetary policy stance and presents tools that country teams can employ to measure, report, and evaluate the stance of monetary policy. The note focuses exclusively on aggregate demand considerations—on whether the stance is tight or loose—without considering whether such a stance is appropriate for achieving policy objectives. The latter requires considering aggregate supply and Phillips Curve trade-offs. The note does not cover other macroeconomic policies, such as macroprudential or fiscal measures, which could also have a considerable impact on the effectiveness of monetary policy.
January 15, 2025
How to Improve Public Investment Management in Low-Income Countries
This How to Note discusses how low-income developing countries (LIDCs) can strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of their public investment. The note draws on Public Investment Management Assessments and focuses on eight institutions that are likely to be key reform priorities in many LIDCs: project appraisal, multi-year budgeting, maintenance, project selection, procurement, availability of funding, project management, and monitoring of public assets. For each of these, the note discusses basic practices, which should be realistic initial reform objectives for low-capacity countries, as well as medium practices that may be relevant objectives for medium-term reforms. The note also discusses how to overcome reform implementation challenges and consolidate the reforms and provides examples of action plans to implement the different reforms.
2024
September 26, 2024
How to Develop and Implement a Medium-Term Fiscal Framework
This Note provides guidance on developing and implementing a medium-term fiscal framework (MTFF). MTFFs aim to promote fiscal discipline and sustainability, transparency, and better-informed fiscal decisions. An MTFF comprises a set of institutional arrangements for prioritizing, presenting, reporting, and managing fiscal aggregates - revenue, expenditure, balance, and debt - generally over a three-to-five-year period. It incorporates a fiscal strategy, medium-term projections of key macroeconomic variables and fiscal aggregates, and ceilings on total expenditure to guide subsequent annual budgets. By introducing a medium-term perspective into fiscal and budgetary decision making, MTFFs provide a clearer understanding of the impact, trade-offs, and risks of policy choices. MTFFs contribute to enhancing transparency and accountability by communicating the government’s medium-term fiscal goals, policies, and fiscal performance. Ultimately, clarity on medium-term fiscal plans and on their effective implementation can bolster confidence in the government’s ability to manage its finances prudently and competently. In addition to providing guidance on how to design an MTFF and the institutional and technical arrangements needed to support implementation, the Note discusses key challenges and presents country examples from across the globe by income group and concludes with lessons learned.
September 19, 2024
How to Design and Implement Property Tax Reforms
Property taxes are often under-exploited sources of local public revenues. A broad-based tax, raised at modest rates, can potentially generate significantly higher revenues in many countries, and meet most of the costs of improved local public services. This note provides a practical guide to designing and implementing reforms to recurrent taxes on immoveable property and real estate transfer taxes. It addresses the fundamental policy choices regarding the property tax base and tax rate, and the key functions of the tax administration for managing collections – valuation, billing, and enforcement. The advice in the note stems from a review of the literature and insights gained from the experiences of the Fiscal Affairs Department in delivering capacity development on property taxes. It covers and updates some of the analytical work by Norregaard (2013) while providing granular advice on practical aspects of reforming property taxes. The note is motivated by the resource mobilization needs of developing countries, but the design considerations are also pertinent for advanced and emerging market economies seeking to increase the revenue productivity of property taxes.
April 4, 2024
How to Set Compensation for Government Employees
Government compensation-setting should be informed by the monitoring of trends in recruitment and retention and benchmarking against the private sector. Unduly high compensation is an inefficient use of resources, while insufficient compensation can hinder efforts to recruit, retain, and motivate the workforce needed to deliver adequate public services. Analyzing these factors at a granular level, for example, by occupation or position, can help to identify specific challenges.
March 11, 2024
Industrial Policy: Trade Policy and World Trade Organization Considerations in IMF Surveillance
With the use and complexity of industrial policy rising, along with the need for active policies to address climate, food, health, and other emergencies, IMF staff are often expected to provide policy and technical advice on trade-related industrial policies to national authorities. This note aims to support country teams with staff guidance, useful questions for engagement with national authorities, and resources on trade related aspects of industrial policies.
March 8, 2024
How to Tax Wealth
Tackling income and wealth inequality is at the top of the policy agenda in many countries. This note discusses three approaches of wealth taxation, based on (1) returns with a capital income tax, (2) stocks with a wealth tax, and (3) transfers of wealth through an inheritance (or estate) tax. Taxing actual returns is generally less distortive and more equitable than a wealth tax. Hence, rather than introducing wealth taxes, reform priorities should focus on strengthening the design of capital income taxes (notably capital gains) and closing existing loopholes, while harnessing technological advances in tax administration—including cross-border information sharing—to foster tax compliance. The inheritance tax is important to address the buildup of dynastic wealth.
2023
December 14, 2023
How to Assess Spending Needs of the Sustainable Development Goals: The Third Edition of the IMF SDG Costing Tool
This note provides a technical overview and description of the 3rd edition of the IMF SDG costing tool that estimates the additional spending needs to achieve a strong performance in selected SDGs for human capital development (health and education) and physical capital development (infrastructure), in particular, water and sanitation, electricity, and roads. The 3rd edition includes data and methodological updates to, but generally remains faithful to the original approach described in, Gaspar et al. (2019). Globally, additional spending needed to achieve a strong performance in the selected SDGs in 2030 amounts to US$3.0 trillion (3.4 percent of 2030 world GDP). Estimated at 16.1 percent of 2030 LIDC GDP, the average additional SDG cost of this income group is significantly higher than in EMEs, who face additional spending amounting to 4.8 percentage points of their GDP in 2030. In contrast to EMEs and LIDCs, the additional cost for AEs is low, under 0.2 percent of their 2030 GDP.
December 4, 2023
How To Design Excise Taxes on Alcoholic Beverages
This How to Note examines the complex interplay between excise taxes on alcohol and alcoholic beverages, their revenue yield, and the public health concerns related to alcohol consumption. The note suggests guidance on how countries can approach the design of excise taxes on alcohol based on theoretical principles as well as empirical evidence drawn from international experience. Key questions addressed include: How important is alcohol consumption, and what form does it take across countries of different income levels? What has been the trend in alcohol excise tax revenue? How can countries design simple excise regimes that yield revenue while having the potential to contribute to reducing the externalities and internalities caused by alcohol consumption?
November 6, 2023
How to Implement Electronic Fiscal Reporting (Fiscalization)
To improve the management of tax compliance risks, tax administrations are increasingly seeking opportunities to enhance their access and use of data. For many years, there has been a worldwide trend to implement electronic fiscal reporting (also known as fiscalization) to achieve these aims. Fiscalization refers to the process of automated reporting of a taxpayer’s business activities to the tax administration. When implemented as an integral part of compliance risk management processes, fiscalization will contribute to an improvement in tax compliance by making it easier for taxpayers to voluntarily comply, and discouraging taxpayers who may choose to not report their business transactions. However, fiscalization alone will not address all tax compliance risks. This how-to note provides practical guidance about the case for fiscalization and implementation approaches, including good practices and practices to avoid in relation to the key dimensions of fiscalization: data collection, data analysis, integration with compliance risk management, consumer engagement, and implementation.
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