Policy Papers
2013
April 16, 2013
Progress Report on the Activities of the Independent Evaluation Office
Description: Since October 2012, the Executive Board has discussed two IEO evaluation reports, International Reserves—IMF Concerns and Country Perspectives on December 7, 2012, and The Role of the IMF as Trusted Advisor on February 1, 2013. The Board also discussed the External Evaluation of the IEO on March 21, 2013. In addition, the IEO advanced work on the ongoing “Assessment of Self-Evaluation in the IMF,” which will go forward to the Executive Board in coming months. Following consultations on possible topics, the IEO has also initiated evaluations on IMF forecasting, country statistics, and the IMF’s response to the global financial crisis.
April 12, 2013
Provisional Agenda for the Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee
Description: The following is the provisional agenda for the Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, which is to be convened at the IMF's Headquarters in Washington, D.C. on April 20, 2013.
April 11, 2013
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative - Statistical Update
Description: This report provides an update on the status of implementation of the HIPC Initiative and the MDRI over the past year. Given that most HIPCs have reached the completion point, in November 2011, the IMF and IDA Boards2 endorsed staff’s proposal to further streamline reporting of progress under the HIPC Initiative and MDRI. It was agreed that the annual HIPC Initiative/MDRI status of implementation report will be discontinued, while the core information—on debt service and poverty reducing expenditure, the cost of debt relief, creditor participation rates, and litigation against HIPCs—should continue to be made available and updated regularly on the IMF and World Bank websites.
April 11, 2013
Stocktaking the Fund’s Engagement with Regional Financing Arrangements
Description: Following the global financial crisis of 2008-09, regional financing arrangements (RFAs) have been recognized as an important layer of the global financial safety net. This paper summarizes the current landscape of RFAs, and discusses IMF-RFA coordination to date and options for enhancing cooperation going forward. In so doing, it intends to contribute to discussions underway at international fora and solicit views from the Fund and RFA memberships on how to enhance cooperation.
April 10, 2013
Proposed Amendment on the Reform of the IMF Executive Board and Fourteenth General Review of Quotas - Status of Acceptances and Consents
Description:
This status report reviews progress toward implementation of the 2010 Quota and Governance Reforms. It updates the status of consents to the proposed quota increases under the 14th General Review of Quotas and of acceptances of the Proposed Seventh Amendment on the Reform of the Executive Board (“Board Reform Amendment” or “Seventh Amendment”) as set out in the Board of Governors Resolution No. 66-2.
For the proposed quota increases under the 14th General Review of Quotas to become effective, members having not less than 70 percent of the total of quotas on November 5, 2010 must consent to the increases in their quotas and the proposed Board Reform Amendment must have entered into force.1 The proposed Board Reform Amendment enters into force once the Fund certifies that three-fifths of the members (i.e., currently 113 members) representing 85 percent of the total voting power have accepted the proposed amendment.
April 3, 2013
Update on the Financing of the Fund’s Concessional Assistance and Debt Relief to Low-Income Member Countries
Description:
This paper reviews recent developments in the status of financing for the Fund’s concessional lending and debt relief. It presents the latest data available and projections whilst taking into account the pledges made thus far in response to the Managing Director’s fund-raising requests of August 2009 and February and November 2012. Additionally, following the Executive Board’s decision in September 2012, the PRGT’s self-sustained capacity is discussed in the context of longer-term projections of the demand for concessional lending.
Section II provides an overview of the Fund’s concessional lending instruments and the associated financing framework as well as the developments since the October 2012 Update. Section III reviews the sources of financing for PRGT operations and discusses developments in the PRGT framework. Section IV reviews the use of PRGT resources and assesses the Trust’s self-sustained capacity in light of the demand projections. Section V provides updates on the subsidization of emergency assistance, while Section VI presents the developments on the financing of debt relief under the HIPC, MDRI, and PCDR Trust. The paper concludes with a proposed decision completing the financing reviews of the PRG-HIPC and MDRI Trusts.
March 28, 2013
FY2014-FY2016 Medium-Term Budget
Description: The proposed FY 14–16 Medium-Term Budget was formulated within the Fund’s strengthened strategic planning framework and seeks to align the allocation of resources to the delivery of institutional priorities. Despite the additional resources that have been provided to meet crisis demands, crisis related work and overall work pressures remain elevated. At the same time, available resources are not being fully utilized. Therefore, the budget strategy—instead of asking for further additional resources—is geared toward making more efficient use of existing resources to reduce work pressures and meet new demands.
March 21, 2013
Implementation Plan in Response to Board-Endorsed Recommendations for the IEO Evaluation of International Reserves--IMF Concerns and Country Perspectives
Description: This paper proposes Management’s response to the IEO’s Evaluation of International Reserves—IMF Concerns and Country Perspectives. The proposed implementation plan focuses on those recommendations that are not already being addressed by other recent Fund initiatives, and include: (i) a successor paper on reserve adequacy, which will review the work contained in the Fund’s 2011 Assessing Reserve Adequacy paper and develop additional and updated guidance where needed; (ii) the preparation of a staff guidance note for assessing adequacy; and (iii) additional engagement on reserve issues with members, the private sector, and academics.
March 20, 2013
Mid-Term Evaluation Report on the Enhanced Data Dissemination Initiative Project
Description:
This report presents the results of the mid-term evaluation of the Enhanced Data Dissemination Initiative (EDDI) financed by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) covering the period April 1, 2010 to September 30, 2012. The evaluation was conducted internally by the IMF in consultation with DFID. EDDI is a five-year project (April 2010–March 2015) implemented by the IMF to improve macroeconomic statistics in 25 African countries. The project includes modules for sub-groups of countries covering national accounts, monetary statistics, government finance statistics (GFS), balance of payments statistics (BOP), and harmonization of statistics in several regional organizations.
The mid-point of a five-year project is an appropriate time for all stakeholders of the project to step back and take stock of what has been accomplished in the first half of the project, what has gone well, what aspects have been disappointing, and what might be adjusted or changed to make the remainder of the project more effective in achieving its objectives.
To facilitate this process, questionnaires were developed to obtain feedback from three groups: counterparts in participating countries, IMF module managers and experts, and DFID country and regional advisors. Recommendations made by the stakeholders that will be followed up in the second half of the project are listed as bullets in italics below.
March 18, 2013
Eligibility to Use the Fund's Facilities for Concessinal Financing
Description:
During the 2012 Review of Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) Eligibility, Executive Directors expressed a number of concerns about the eligibility framework. The Board decided to bring forward the next review of eligibility by one year, to early 2013, in light of these concerns. In particular, Directors called for the review to assess:
Possible shortcomings of the gross national income (GNI) per capita criterion in the case of small states, and whether additional or alternative variables should be used to better capture members‘ circumstances, particularly those of small states; as well as further options to enhance the flexibility of the PRGT-eligibility framework to cover small and very small countries;
The application of the short-term vulnerabilities criterion for graduation, which can lead to repeated non-graduation of members that meet either the income or the market access criteria for graduation.