Spillover Reports

Spillover Reports

What are spillover reports, and what do they cover? As part of its broader efforts to strengthen its surveillance, the IMF adopted an Integrated Surveillance Decision (ISD) in 2012, which calls for more systematic coverage of spillovers from members’ economic and financial policies in Article IV consultations and better integrates bilateral and multilateral surveillance. The Decision allows the IMF to discuss with its members the full range of spillovers from their policies, on domestic but also global stability, and encourage discussion of spillovers issues at multilateral forums to foster policy attention and multilateral dialogue.

The IMF’s spillover reports started in 2011. Until 2013, they focused on the external effects of domestic policies in five systemic economies (S5): China, the euro area, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States. Since 2014, the IMF has shifted to a more thematic approach in organizing the spillover report, focusing on key spillover issues. The specific topics have been chosen based on their conjunctural relevance from a spillover perspective: for example, examining spillovers that are policy induced—including from economies outside of the S5 (i.e., policy-induced global spillovers)—or spillovers that are relevant for policies in the spillover-recipient economies even when the exact source of the spillover is not fully identified (i.e., policy-relevant global spillovers).