Low-Income Countries
The IMF has acted with unprecedented speed and scale to support low-income countries during the pandemic. The Fund provided financial support to 53 of 69 eligible low-income countries in 2020 and in the first half of 2021, with about US$14 billion disbursed as zero percent interest rate loans from the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust.
Most of this support was through the Fund’s emergency financing instruments—the Rapid Credit Facility (RCF) and Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI)—which provide immediate, one-time disbursements to countries facing urgent balance of payments needs. The Fund was able to respond to a record number of requests for financial assistance through a series of temporary access limit increases to the RCF and RFI, and temporary increases in the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) overall access limits.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva delivers a keynote address on the global economic outlook and policy priorities ahead of the 2026 IMF–World Bank Spring Meetings, followed by a conversation moderated by Michael Froman, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Remarks by IMF First Deputy Managing Director Dan Katz at the China Development Forum
The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today completed the ninth and tenth reviews under the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) arrangement for Guinea-Bissau.
The Solomon Islands economy is estimated to have grown by 3.5 percent in 2025, driven by agriculture and gold production. The conflict in the Middle East, if prolonged, would weigh on economic activity and outlook.
Washington, D.C. - March 19, 2026: Statement by Mr. Evan Papageorgiou, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Mission Chief for Sri Lanka:
IMF staff and the Seychellois authorities reached a staff-level agreement on the policies needed to complete the two final reviews under the 36-month Extended Fund Facility and Resilience and Sustainability Facility.
The costs of fragility are high, but judicious economic policies can help foster trust and support economic stability and growth
Capital markets integration, expanding opportunities for workers, and bigger consumer markets will allow companies to grow faster
Building foreign exchange reserves requires sound policies and takes time, but global efforts to lower the cost of holding them can help
There are few elegant, easy, or politically attractive ways to reduce debt
Diversification has become harder since 2020 as stocks and bonds tend to move in tandem during sharp selloffs, adding to financial stability concerns
But risks are rising, including from the concentration of tech investment and the negative effects of trade disruptions, which may build over time
In line with the framework for addressing excessive delays in the completion of Article IV consultations, the following table lists the IMF members for whom the Article IV consultation has been delayed by more than 18 months as of December 31, 2025.
This CD Guidance Note provides a one-stop source of information and reference materials on Fund CD-related policies, practices, and procedures. In line with the Management Implementation Plan (MIP) on the Independent Evaluation Office’s (IEO) 2022 Evaluation of CD, this Guidance Note supersedes the 2019 IMF Policies and Practices on Capacity Development and serves to operationalize the recommendations of the 2024 CDSR. It also integrates relevant earlier guidance to staff related to CD delivery and management.
This note provides guidance to country teams on the application of Fund policies and procedures related to data provision to the Fund for surveillance purposes. It provides staff with clear procedures and practical tools for the assessment of data adequacy and guidance on the Fund’s collaborative framework to identify and address data shortcomings, hampering surveillance and support members’ data production and provision capacity. The note operationalizes recent Board reviews of the policies on data provision to the Fund and data adequacy that strengthen the Fund’s ability to conduct robust and evenhanded surveillance by ensuring that data provision keeps pace with evolving analytical and policy needs.
The Short-term Liquidity Line (SLL), introduced in 2020, was designed as a revolving liquidity backstop for countries with very strong economic fundamentals and institutional policy frameworks. It aims to address short-term, moderate balance of payments needs arising from capital flow volatility, helping to prevent emerging liquidity pressures from escalating into broader macroeconomic or financial instability. However, uptake has been limited, with only one arrangement for Chile in 2022, which was canceled shortly thereafter in favor of a Flexible Credit Line (FCL).
The Executive Board discussed the Independent Evaluation Office’s review of IMF fiscal policy advice from 2008 to 2023. Directors welcomed the evaluation and noted the Fund’s progress in adapting its guidance to changing global conditions. The discussion highlighted the evolution from a narrow focus on debt sustainability toward a more integrated approach that balances fiscal sustainability, output stabilization, and long-term growth. Directors acknowledged improvements in analytical tools, including debt sustainability frameworks and fiscal risk assessments, while emphasizing the need for clearer articulation of fiscal stance and better integration of long-term spending priorities. The Board reaffirmed its commitment to transparency and consistency in providing candid, country-specific advice to help members navigate fiscal challenges.
The Managing Director welcomes the Independent Evaluation Office’s assessment of IMF fiscal policy advice over the past 15 years. The evaluation highlights the Fund’s evolution from a narrow focus on debt sustainability to a more balanced framework that integrates output stabilization, fiscal sustainability, and long-term growth objectives.
In light of recent global shocks and rising external volatility, there is a growing need to effectively monitor short-term economic fluctuations, especially in countries with limited access to high-frequency growth data. This paper examines the application of the Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) model to the case of nowcasting quarterly economic growth in Tanzania, leveraging a range of high-frequency economic indicators. The BSTS model provides a flexible framework that incorporates trends, seasonal variations, and regression effects, while its spike-and-slab variable selection helps identify relevant indicators. This paper outlines a framework for model selection and evaluation, including robustness checks and sensitivity analysis, and demonstrate the model’s relative performance. Additionally, the model’s capacity to adapt to longer forecast horizons and dynamic regressors enhances its utility for understanding growth trends in changing economic environments.
This paper estimates debt overhang thresholds separately for 105 countries using a Kalman Filter approach applied to a standard growth model. The results reveal pronounced heterogeneity in the estimated thresholds, both within and across country groups but limited time-variation. In a second step, we explore the structural factors underlying this heterogeneity. The empirical results underscore that a strong payment track record, high quality institutions and governance, public debt composition (currency, maturity, and creditor base), and financial market size and development are associated with higher pubic debt overhang thresholds.
Europe’s defense spending is undergoing a historic shift. With NATO members expected to reach 2% of GDP and discussions underway to increase targets to 5% by 2035, this paper examines the possible macroeconomic consequences of such rearmament using two complementary approaches. First, using an annual panel dataset covering 27 EU countries over the period 1989–2023, we show that past national defense spending has stimulated economic activity in the short term, and entailed sizable cross-border spillovers. Importantly, we find that spending multipliers varied considerably across countries and over time: they tended to be larger when import intensity is low, fiscal space (captured by sovereign yields spread) is ample, and public investment efficiency is high. Second, a novel high-frequency dataset of monthly defense procurement contracts from Opentender, covering EU-27 countries from 2009 to 2023, allows for improved causal identification using fiscal news and instrumental variables based on European aggregate defense procurement and each country’s geographic proximity to major adversaries. The estimates corroborate the positive effects of defense spending on output and show that equipment procurement has the strongest relative impact. Given the larger and more synchronized nature of the current European defense buildup relative to past national episodes in our sample, multipliers might fall below historical estimates, especially if monetary policy is not accommodative.
This paper develops a methodology to assess the impact of a trade diversification strategy on aggregate import costs. Using granular bilateral import data for The Bahamas, we estimate that strategically reallocating about 2 to 3 percent of imports could reduce the annual import bill by 2 to 5 percent, depending on the degree of import substitution at the intensive and extensive margins. A large share of these savings is concentrated in a small number of source countries and product categories, indicating that a targeted strategy could yield prompt results and improve the current account to GDP ratio by 0.5 to 1.5 percent. The findings also shed light on the potential of trade diversification as a tool to alleviate some cost-of-living pressures in small open economies if accompanied by suitable reforms.
We examine whether financial market participants, in aggregate, expect stablecoins to play an important role in payments. Using high-frequency variation in stock prices, we estimate that U.S. legislation supporting the use of stablecoins in payments reduced the market value of listed incumbent payment firms by 18% or approximately $300 billion, consistent with stablecoins increasing competition in the payments sector. This impact is larger than that of other recent pro-competitive regulatory shocks and (i) proportionately larger for incumbents focused on cross-border payments, (ii) smaller for incumbents protected by network effects, and (iii) smaller for incumbents already offering crypto-related services.
This paper presents a nowcasting model for global trade that allows for regional dynamics and spillovers. World trade growth is driven by common global factors but also regional trends. While existing trade nowcasting models have focused on the former, we allow for the latter using a dynamic factor model (DFM) with a multi-factor block structure. By directly modeling global trends, regional variation and spillovers, we improve on the performance of standard trade nowcasting models, particularly periods characterized by regional heterogeneity. A multi-factor regional framework may be particularly advantageous for tracking trade developments in the future given a period changing trade patterns and geo-economic fragmentation. The model also sheds light on trade spillovers and the drivers of news in global trade: Asia, in particular, has notable spillovers to the global and other regional trade cycles.
