Technical Assistance Reports
2024
February 16, 2024
Saint Lucia: Technical Assistance Report-Report on External Sector Statistics Mission (October 24–28, 2022)
Description: A technical assistance (TA) mission on external sector statistics (ESS) was conducted to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of Saint Lucia as part of the Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Centre (CARTAC) work program on ESS. The mission focused on improving key source data with the objective to strengthen the compilation of the balance of payments and the international investment position (IIP) statistics. The mission also provided practical advice during its review of the provisional 2021 balance of payments and IIP statistics, which were released in December 2022.
February 14, 2024
Armenia: Technical Assistance Report-Enhancement of Public Investment Management Practices for Domestic and Externally Financed Projects
Description: This report analyzes current public investment practices in Armenia and identifies key reform areas. Building on the 2018 Public Investment Management Assessment (PIMA), it provides an overview of the Public Investment Management process and challenges to be tackled, including bottlenecks and solutions for the domestically and foreign financed projects. For domestically financed projects, the key recommendations are to ensure consistency of the definition of public investments across laws and regulations, ensure that all new projects use the PIM process by requiring key information for all projects, adopt a gradual approach to implementing the new procedures in the 2023 PIM Decree, and redesign the institutional framework for project monitoring. For foreign financed projects the key recommendations are to pilot projects in close coordination with one or more development partners to identify potential updates to the PIM decree and strengthen the existing monitoring framework.
January 31, 2024
Belize: Technical Assistance Report-Improving Financial Reporting and Accountability
Description: The CARTAC technical assistance (TA) mission in Belize aimed to address the backlog in Annual Financial Statements (AFS) and enhance bank reconciliations (BR) capacity. The anticipated outcome included improved financial reporting, accountability, and overall public financial management (PFM).
January 29, 2024
Guatemala: Technical Assistance Report-The Statistical Component of Liquidity Forecasting
Description: A Technical Assistance (TA) mission was conducted in Guatemala City, Guatemala, from June 12 to 16, 2023, to assist the authorities with the statistical component of liquidity management. The TA mission focused on time series analysis of the demand for liquidity and autonomous factors. Peculiarities in the set-up of the reserve requirement creates an interesting forecasting challenge that the mission addressed by forecasting each deposit type of the reserve requirement base and the demand for excess reserves by banks. Statistical reconciliation is then used to obtain an aggregated forecast. The reconciliation improves forecast accuracy. The TA report provides an overview of the results emanating from these tasks and provides key recommendations on using the statistical forecast to complement the institutional information and to check the quality of the information directly obtained from counterparties. The TA also recommended the publication of the forecasts, starting with the one-day horizon (for which forecast errors are limited), to help banks formulate a better-informed bidding at the daily deposit operations. Moreover, the report provides a detailed summary of the technical components of the liquidity forecasting model – which, in conjunction with a three-day workshop conducted during the mission on running the model – provides guidance to authorities on institutionalizing this model to routinely conduct liquidity forecasting.
January 29, 2024
Panama: Technical Assistance Report-Government Finance Statistics and Public Sector Debt Statistics (November 7-21, 2022)
Description: [This report is only available in Spanish] This technical assistance (TA) mission on Government Finance Statistics (GFS) and Public Sector Debt Statistics (PSDS) was conducted during November 7 – 21, 2022. The main purpose of the mission was to review the progress made by the authorities in implementing previous TA recommendations and provide further support to strengthen the compilation and dissemination of GFS, for units of the general government and the nonfinancial public sector, in line with international standards set out in the Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014 (GFSM 2014).
January 26, 2024
Panama: Technical Assistance Report-Report on Government Finance Statistics (March 28 -April 1, 2022)
Description: [This report is only available in Spanish] This technical assistance (TA) mission on Government Finance Statistics (GFS) was conducted during March 28 – April 1, 2022. The main purpose of the mission was to review the progress made by the authorities in implementing previous TA recommendations and provide further support to strengthen the compilation and dissemination of GFS, for units of the general government and the nonfinancial public sector, in line with international standards set out in the Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014 (GFSM 2014).
January 12, 2024
Saint Lucia: Technical Assistance Report-External Sector Statistics Mission
Description: A technical assistance (TA) mission on external sector statistics (ESS) was conducted to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of Saint Lucia as part of the Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Centre (CARTAC) work program on ESS. The mission focused on addressing data compilation issues of trade in goods (in particular on the import and re-export of fuel), travel credits, Citizenship by Investment, and Special Purpose Entities transactions for the balance of payments.