See Also:

Balance of Payments Home Page

Reserve Assets Technical Expert Group

Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB): metadata on SDDS and GDDS data categories

External Debt Statistics: debt data, conference on capital flows and debt statistics, final draft Guide for Compilers and Users, and other selected publications

 Data Template on
 International Reserves and
 Foreign Currency Liquidity

This website re-disseminates IMF member countries' data on international reserves and foreign currency liquidity in a common template and in a common currency (the U.S. dollar). Historical data by country and selected topics are also available.

As part of the efforts to strengthen the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS), on March 23, 1999 the Fund's Executive Board approved the incorporation of the data template on international reserves and foreign currency liquidity into the SDDS as a prescribed component with a transition period to run through March 31 of 2000. Following the end of the transition period, SDDS-subscribing countries began disseminating the template data on a monthly basis, with no more than a one-month lag. Thus, the first set of template data for end April 2000 were disseminated by the end of May 2000.

The data template establishes standards for the provision of information to the public on the amount and composition of official reserve assets, other foreign currency assets held by the monetary authorities and the central government, short-term foreign currency obligations, and related activities (such as financial derivatives positions and guarantees extended by the government for quasi-official and private sector borrowing) of the monetary authorities and the central government that can lead to drains on reserves and other foreign currency assets. Operational Guidelines designed to assist countries in the preparation of template data were issued in October 1999 and are accessible from this site.

On March 29, 2000, the Fund's Executive Board approved both the establishment of a common database for the collection of template data disseminated by SDDS subscribing countries and the re-dissemination of these data through the Fund's external website. Countries participating in this endeavor do so on a voluntary basis. Participating countries provide the information to the Fund in a common template soon after they disseminate the data in their national media. Please note that the re-dissemination of the template data by the Fund does not constitute endorsement of the quality of the data by the Fund.

The data available in this website are presented in several ways to facilitate users' viewing, printing, and downloading of the information. For example, countries' current data are accessible in the html format, their historical (time series) data are shown in both pdf and csv (spreadsheet compatible) formats.

Reporting countries are requested to use a "zero" to denote the value of an item that is zero or close to zero and to leave a cell blank where the item is "not applicable."

Queries regarding the Data Template on International Reserves and Foreign Currency Liquidity may be sent to statisticsQuery@imf.org.