Free Email Notification

Receive emails when we post new items of interest to you.

Subscribe or Modify your profile

Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER)

Last updated: June 30, 2008

The COFER database

COFER is an IMF database that keeps end-of-period quarterly data on the currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves. The currencies identified in COFER are:

  • U.S. dollar,
  • Euro,
  • Pound sterling,
  • Japanese yen,
  • Swiss francs, and  
  • Other currencies.

Before the euro was introduced in 1999, the European currencies identified separately were:

  • European Currency Unit (ECU),
  • Deutsche mark,
  • French franc, and
  • Netherlands guilder.

Foreign exchange reserves in COFER consist of the monetary authorities’ claims on nonresidents in the form of:

  • foreign banknotes,
  • bank deposits,
  • treasury bills,
  • short- and long-term government securities, and
  • other claims usable in the event of balance of payments needs.

Foreign exchange reserves in COFER do not include holdings of a currency by the issuing country. For instance, the U.S. dollar assets of the Federal Reserve and the euro assets of the European Central Bank and member countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union are not foreign exchange reserves. The definition of foreign exchange reserves in COFER is the same as that in the IMF’s International Financial Statistics (IFS).

COFER data are reported on a voluntary basis. At present, there are 138 repoters, consisting of member countries of the IMF (27 industrial countries and 106 developing countries), non-member countries/economies, and other foreign exchange reserves holding entities. The classification of countries in COFER (as industrial or developing) follows that currently used in IFS world tables.

The COFER presentation

COFER data for individual countries are strictly confidential. The data presented in the attached tables (CSV and PDF) are aggregated data for each currency for three groupings of countries:

  • All countries,
  • Industrial countries, and
  • Developing countries.

In addition to the lines for the five major currencies and “other currencies” there are two other lines in the tables:

  • Unallocated Reserves, and
  • Allocated Reserves.  

The Unallocated Reserves line captures the difference between the total reserves data reported to IFS (for the world table on Foreign Exchange) and to COFER, for each of the country groupings mentioned above. It consists of two components:

  • The total reserves of nonreporting countries, i.e., the countries within each grouping, which do not report currency composition data to COFER, and
    any discrepancy between reporters’ data on total reserves as reported to COFER and to IFS.
  •  The Allocated Reserves line equals the reporters’ data on total reserves as reported to COFER.      

Very little estimation is used in producing the COFER tables. Estimation is undertaken only for data gaps of four quarters or less.

Country coverage (of Allocated Reserves)

Industrial countries

All industrial countries report to COFER. The Unallocated Reserves for industrial countries represent the discrepancy in total reserves data reported to COFER and to IFS.1

Developing countries

A moving sample of developing countries report to COFER in the sense that the data include some countries that did not report on all the dates indicated. For example, during 1995Q4 to 2005Q3, this sample ranged from 80 to 90 reporters (out of 160 countries) and accounted for between 51 and 66 percent of total developing country reserves.

Although the sample varied (as countries either stopped, started, or resumed reporting to COFER), the changes for the most part have involved countries with negligible reserves relative to the total for all developing countries. To identify major changes, the COFER presentation will flag the dates whenever the sample changes involve countries whose combined reserves exceed 5 percent of the total allocated reserves of developing countries. For the period, 1995Q4 to 2005Q3, there was only one such date, 1996Q1, which is flagged in the attached tables.

Other characteristics of developing country reporters

The reporting sample is not random by construction because it depends on the willingness of individual country authorities to report to COFER. On a geographical basis, the rate of reporting compliance—measured in terms of the percentage of regional reserves accounted for by the reporters—is highest for countries from Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

Queries on COFER may be sent to StatisticsQuery@imf.org.

1The discrepancies are very minor, reflecting usually the omission of some small reserve assets, the currency composition of which may not be available.