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Officials whose main responsibility is compiling balance of payments statistics. The course is not aimed at officials engaged in the analysis of balance of payments developments.
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Applicants should have a degree in economics or equivalent.
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This six-week course, presented by the IMF's Statistics Department, provides training on the methodology for collecting and compiling balance of payments and international investment position statistics based on the IMF's sixth edition of the Balance of Payments Manual. It consists of a series of lectures, discussions, practical exercises, and case studies. Lectures and class discussions focus on general concepts and compilation practices, while exercises and case studies provide participants with an opportunity to put knowledge learned into practice. During the course, participants are afforded an opportunity to discuss problems that they have actually encountered in the course of their work on compilation of balance of payments and international investment position statistics in their respective countries.
The course covers
(1) the conceptual framework of the balance of payments and international investment position, including the double-entry system; concepts of economic territory, residence, and center of economic interest; principles for valuation and time of recording; and the unit of account and conversion;
(2) classification and coverage of the standard components of the balance of payments and the international investment position, including goods, services, income, current and capital transfers, direct investment, portfolio investment, financial derivatives, other investment, and reserves;
(3) data sources and methods used to collect and compile the statistics, including the use of administrative data, enterprise surveys (including survey design and sampling methods), and use of an international transactions reporting system; and
(4) other topics, including external debt statistics, the relationship between balance of payments statistics and other macroeconomic statistics, dissemination standards, analysis and use of balance of payments statistics, and assessing the quality of balance of payments statistics through reference to the IMF's Data Quality Assessment Framework developed for the balance of payments.
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