## EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — Staff Guidance Note on Information Sharing in the Context of Sovereign Debt Restructurings ## Source details **Canonical URL:** [EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — Staff Guidance Note on Information Sharing in the Context of Sovereign Debt Restructurings](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/pp/2023/english/ppea2023027.pdf) ## Other formats - [Markdown version](/-/media/files/publications/pp/2023/english/ppea2023027.pdf.md) - [Structured JSON version](/-/media/files/publications/pp/2023/english/ppea2023027.pdf.json) --- ### Purpose and scope - Where a debt restructuring is needed to restore debt sustainability in a member country, the Fund can facilitate the sharing of information underlying the member country’s program and staff’s assessment of debt sustainability to inform creditors’ decisions on financing assurances and restructuring implementation. - The extent of information sharing, with whom, when, and the modalities will be determined by the specific context, weighing considerations set out in this note. - Although information sharing is necessary, in general the draft debt sustainability analysis document itself cannot be shared and should be kept confidential until endorsed by the Executive Board and published. - Staff should consult with LEG and SPR when questions arise about information sharing. ### Key definitions and frameworks - The Fund’s debt sustainability analysis (DSA) is conducted under two frameworks: - Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries (LIC-DSF) — conducted jointly with the World Bank and subject to special Fund-Bank information sharing and approval provisions. - Sovereign Risk and Debt Sustainability Framework (SRDSF) — conducted solely by the Fund for market-access countries. - The Fund’s analysis is done in the context of: - Use of Fund Resources (UFR), and - Article IV surveillance. ### Guiding principles for information sharing - General practice: share information necessary to inform the restructuring process. Information can be shared directly by the Fund (with debtor authorities’ consent) or by the debtor authorities (with the Fund’s consent). - The DSA reflects the independent assessment of the Fund; Fund staff do not “negotiate” the DSA or program design with third parties. Staff may consider creditor and civil society views but staff views (with authority input) are dispositive for preparing the DSA. - Modalities for providing information can vary and may include oral presentations, selected charts or tables, and presentations at meetings. - Recipient-specific guidance: - Debtor’s financial and legal advisors: presumption of sufficient exchange of information to allow them to do their work; some flexibility warranted in modality and scope. - Official creditor fora: Fund staff uses standard agreements with templates on balance of payments and financing gaps (e.g., Paris Club Secretariat practice, G20 Common Framework cases). - Sequencing and equity: - Past practice: information often shared first with official sector creditors due to financing assurances requirements, but case-specific factors may warrant different sequencing. - Parallel sharing with both private and official creditors can promote equal information, intercreditor equity, and consistent macroframeworks. - Information sharing should generally match the sequencing of restructurings (share with the creditor pool being restructured first, or ideally all creditors simultaneously if restructured at the same time). - Confidentiality requirements: - Information underlying the DSA is confidential and sensitive; sharing requires safeguards. - For private creditors, a specific written confidentiality commitment (e.g., non-disclosure agreement (NDA)) is required. - Staff should ensure recipients understand that shared information is confidential, not final, subject to change, reflects only staff’s views, and has not yet been approved by the Executive Board. ### Restriction on sharing the draft DSA - Staff cannot share the draft DSA document (or file) itself unless first endorsed by the Fund’s Executive Board, but may share parts of the underlying information subject to safeguards. - In surveillance and UFR contexts, a DSA forms part of an Executive Board document and is covered by the Transparency Policy and related guidance. - Country documents and parts thereof (draft or final) generally cannot be shared outside the Fund prior to Executive Board issuance and publication. - DSAs prepared in the context of capacity development (CD) are an exception to this rule; CD documents are not subject to Executive Board approval for publication purposes. ### Special considerations for sharing with the World Bank - LIC-DSFs are produced jointly; a special regime with well-documented rules governs engagement and information sharing with World Bank staff. Fund staff are expected to engage World Bank staff from early stages of missions and analysis. - For SRDSF, sharing country staff reports (including drafts) with World Bank staff prior to Fund Executive Board issuance is permitted under the Bank-Fund Concordat; mission chiefs generally retain discretion over sharing. ### Limits of the Fund’s role in restructurings - The Fund’s policies govern how it deals with different creditor classes (multilaterals, official bilateral creditors, private creditors). - Beyond policy requirements, the Fund does not prescribe burden sharing among creditors or enforce intercreditor equity. - The Fund will: - Define the perimeter of public debt for DSA purposes, - Classify claims for policy purposes, and - May take views on macroeconomic context (e.g., financial stability) that inform authorities’ decisions. - The Fund leaves the debt restructuring strategy, precise perimeter of claims to be treated, and specific terms of restructuring agreements to negotiations between creditors and debtor authorities. ### Information sharing across restructuring phases - Overarching principle: provide creditors enough information, especially once specific and credible financing assurances are needed, to enable them to produce restructuring scenarios that meet program financing parameters and debt sustainability targets. Phase One: Pre-Announcement - Before the debtor authorities announce their intention to seek a debt restructuring, the Fund should not share any non-public information with creditors. - Staff may assess debt as unsustainable in Article IV or UFR reports, but must not engage or share non-public information with creditors prior to the authorities’ announcement. - Published staff reports may be shared and referenced by staff. - For SRDSF users, staff cannot share information related to the mechanical signal on debt sustainability with creditors if that signal is not available in a published report. Phase Two: Post-Announcement, Up to an SLA - During program design, creditors often seek access to the information underlying the Fund’s DSA: - Staff or the authorities may share information demonstrating why debt is unsustainable (e.g., that debt or gross financing needs increase unsustainably over time or that another stress metric reaches unsafe levels). Such scenarios may be underpinned by staff’s preliminary calibration of the program macro-framework. - Creditors will want to learn key macro parameters under a potential Fund-supported program to understand program design. - Staff can discuss preliminary views embodied in presented numbers but should signal they are mainly seeking creditor input at this stage. - Discussions may include views on macroeconomic variables, pace and size of market access, and confirmation of debt characteristics held by creditors. Conditional sharing of financing envelope and key financing assumptions (paragraph 14) - Staff may consider sharing, with the debtor authorities’ consent and subject to confidentiality safeguards, certain information on the financing envelope and key financing assumptions to reduce the likelihood of protracted negotiations by enhancing authorities’ credibility that the debtor needs the contribution the program may require to restore sustainability. - Preconditions and signals: - Staff should only take this step once comfortable that the program macro-framework is close to being stabilized. - Staff should clearly signal that the information being shared may be subject to change as the SLA is finalized. - Staff should signal a willingness to receive information from and hear the views of creditors. - Information that could be shared (subject to confidentiality safeguards): - Macroeconomic projections, including growth and inflation rate projections, balance of payment forecasts, exchange rate projections, monetary and central bank accounts in detail; staff should be prepared to explain the assumptions and analysis that underpin the forecasts. - Fiscal projections; staff should be prepared to explain the assumptions and analysis that underpin the forecast and the rationale for the fiscal targets. Phase Three: Post SLA, Up to Obtaining Assurances — greater information sharing - After reaching an SLA, a higher degree of information sharing may be necessary for creditors to agree to provide financing assurances and debt sustainability assurances or to conclude a restructuring agreement. - Additional information that can be shared subject to confidentiality safeguards: - Additional years of projections beyond what is usually included in the macroframework; and/or further disaggregation of data (e.g., for debt stock or debt service to individual creditors or between amortizations and interest payments). - Public debt targets relating to the program (such as the parameters that ensure debt sustainability, the medium-term targets for the stock and liquidity indicators, and average and maximum gross financing needs). - Modeling questions: staff may answer modeling questions from official bilateral creditors (e.g., range of magnitudes of the present value reduction that could deliver program targets and whether the program targets can be achieved without a nominal haircut). In responding, staff must make clear the response is technical and not a normative assessment from the Fund. Early technical engagement could help accelerate official bilateral creditors’ decision to join an official creditor committee. Subsequent review under a Fund arrangement - The higher degree of information sharing would carry over to a subsequent review under a Fund arrangement. - If circumstances warrant, Fund staff may need to update the macroeconomic framework. - General expectation: staff should not expect significant deviations in economic circumstances post-arrangement approval, and technical macro updates are generally not expected to lead to changes in program parameters (e.g., DSA landing zones or financing gap). - If there is a significant change in the macro environment, changes to program parameters and assumptions may be necessary and should be reviewed by departments and approved by Fund management prior to being shared. Situations and counterparties for broader information sharing (paragraph 17 examples) - With official bilateral creditors from whom specific and credible assurances are required: - If sharing is done in context of an established framework (e.g., the Paris Club or Common Framework), the process is more straightforward given the Fund’s good offices role and existing confidentiality understandings. - Staff’s default position should be to also share with non-Paris Club official creditors (or non-Common Framework official bilateral creditors) due to intercreditor equity considerations, subject to debtor authorities’ consent, confidentiality understandings, and creditor’s claims being critical to restore debt sustainability. - With multilateral creditors (World Bank Group outside LIC-DSF, other IFIs, RFAs): - Where a multilateral creditor is being asked to provide new money to fill financing gaps in a Fund-supported program, it may need access to data to better understand program parameters. - Staff can share a broader extent of data with these institutions due to long-standing relationships and confidentiality understandings; authorities’ consent remains important. - With private sector creditors: - Sharing broader information could raise confidentiality concerns and would require case-specific judgment (e.g., presence of a representative creditor committee with confidentiality safeguards). - Most importantly, information may only be shared where the debtor authorities consent and staff is ensured confidentiality will be maintained (e.g., shared with creditors’ advisors only). ### Sharing the Full DSA - There will be cases where staff judges that waiting to share the full DSA with creditors until Executive Board consideration of the Article IV or UFR staff report package would be detrimental (e.g., meaningful delay expected until Executive Board consideration). - Options for sharing the DSA with the Executive Board earlier so it can be published and made available to creditors (each requires the DSA be issued to the Executive Board before publication): - Modality 1: Request for DSA-related capacity development (CD) from the authorities; full discussion of the TA report with the authorities; provision of the TA report to Executive Directors for information, with authorities’ consent to publish. This was done for Argentina in 2020. Under CD dissemination policy, the DSA is provided to the Executive Board for information rather than endorsement. - Modality 2: Stand-alone DSA. Examples include standalone DSAs prepared for Greece in the UFR context in 2015 and in the surveillance context in 2016 that the Executive Board agreed to publish. Applicable in surveillance or program contexts. - Modality 3: Executive Board approval in principle (AIP) of the program. AIP can be recommended where staff and authorities have full agreement on policies and the only issue preventing arrangement approval is the need to catalyze creditor agreement on debt sustainability and/or financing assurances. Where AIP is granted, the member does not receive financing until the Fund determines debt sustainability is being restored upon receipt of financing assurances. The staff report including the DSA is presumed to be published under the transparency policy. This was done for Greece’s SBA in 2017. ### Information sharing in the surveillance context - Staff must be more circumspect in surveillance: - In the absence of a Fund-supported program and an MEFP, staff is generally not in a position to talk with precision about the authorities’ intended policies or their expected macroeconomic framework and thus cannot discuss what would make the situation sustainable in terms of debt targets. - Staff can discuss published surveillance work, covering staff’s views about the macroeconomic outlook and debt sustainability, and the assumptions that fed into this; staff should be clear these represent staff views. - In an ongoing Article IV consultation, staff should listen to creditors’ views to inform staff judgment about the outlook and debt sustainability and be clear that staff views, taking into account feedback from the authorities, are dispositive for preparing the DSA. - Authorities may request staff to more formally provide views via technical assistance (the first modality for full DSA sharing): (i) request for DSA-related CD; (ii) full discussion of the CD report with the authorities; (iii) provision of the CD report to the Executive Board for information, with authorities’ consent to publish (Argentina 2020 example). ### Information sharing with civil society - Authorities are encouraged to share information with civil society at each phase of the debt restructuring process and to listen to views, subject to: - Pre-debt restructuring announcement: same considerations as paragraph 12 for creditors apply; no non-public information should be shared. - Post-debt restructuring announcement: for all phases, authorities must proceed subject to confidentiality safeguards, as program discussions are confidential. Confidential or market sensitive information cannot be shared. - Staff and authorities may discuss any published information. - In surveillance contexts, the same considerations for creditors (paragraphs 20–21) apply to civil society. ### Process options for sharing a full Debt Sustainability Assessment (summarized) - Three modalities: - Capacity Development (CD): - Initiated at the request of the country authorities; content depends on scope of TA request; issued to the Executive Board for information; publication voluntary and subject to authorities’ consent. - Pros: enabling provision of a DSA outside a program context. - Cons: lack of Executive Board involvement potentially undermining legitimacy. - Standalone DSA: - Initiated by Fund management or at authorities’ request; full, updated DSA with main findings; issued to the Executive Board for endorsement or information; access under the Fund’s Transparency Policy or Executive Board decision to publish. - AIP (Approval in Principle): - Initiated by Fund management at the request of authorities; full set of program documents including staff report, DSA, LOI, MEFP and TMU; Executive Board issues formal consideration and decision for approval in principle; presumed to be published under the Transparency Policy; available in limited circumstances and requires full agreement on policies related to a Fund-supported program. ### Contact point - For questions related to sharing debt sustainability-related information and data, contact SPR Debt Policy management and the LEG working group on sovereign debt restructuring (LEGWGSDR). *Source: STAFF GUIDANCE NOTE ON INFORMATION SHARING IN THE CONTEXT OF SOVEREIGN DEBT RESTRUCTURINGS, June 6, 2023.* ### EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ### EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ### Purpose and scope - Where a debt restructuring is needed to restore debt sustainability in a member country, the Fund can facilitate the sharing of information underlying the member country’s program and staff’s assessment of debt sustainability to inform creditors’ decisions on financing assurances and restructuring implementation. - The extent of information sharing, with whom, when, and the modalities will be determined by the specific context, weighing considerations set out in this note. - Although information sharing is necessary, in general the draft debt sustainability analysis document itself cannot be shared and should be kept confidential until endorsed by the Executive Board and published. - Staff should consult with LEG and SPR when questions arise about information sharing. ### Key definitions and frameworks - The Fund’s debt sustainability analysis (DSA) is conducted under two frameworks: - Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries (LIC-DSF) — conducted jointly with the World Bank and subject to special Fund-Bank information sharing and approval provisions. - Sovereign Risk and Debt Sustainability Framework (SRDSF) — conducted solely by the Fund for market-access countries. - The Fund’s analysis is done in the context of: - Use of Fund Resources (UFR), and - Article IV surveillance. ### Guiding principles for information sharing - General practice: share information necessary to inform the restructuring process. Information can be shared directly by the Fund (with debtor authorities’ consent) or by the debtor authorities (with the Fund’s consent). - The DSA reflects the independent assessment of the Fund; Fund staff do not “negotiate” the DSA or program design with third parties. Staff may consider creditor and civil society views but staff views (with authority input) are dispositive for preparing the DSA. - Modalities for providing information can vary and may include oral presentations, selected charts or tables, and presentations at meetings. - Recipient nature matters: - Debtor’s financial and legal advisors: presumption of sufficient exchange of information to allow them to do their work; some flexibility warranted in modality and scope. - Official creditor fora: Fund staff uses standard agreements with templates on balance of payments and financing gaps (e.g., Paris Club Secretariat practice, G20 Common Framework cases). - Sequencing between official and private creditors: - Past practice: information often shared first with official sector creditors due to financing assurances requirements, but case-specific factors may warrant different sequencing. - Parallel sharing with both private and official creditors can promote equal information, intercreditor equity, and consistent macroframeworks. - Information sharing should generally match the sequencing of restructurings (share with the creditor pool being restructured first, or ideally all creditors simultaneously if restructured at the same time). - Confidentiality requirements: - Information underlying the DSA is confidential and sensitive; sharing requires safeguards. - For private creditors, a specific written confidentiality commitment (e.g., non-disclosure agreement (NDA)) is required. - Staff should ensure recipients understand that shared information is confidential, not final, subject to change, reflects only staff’s views, and has not yet been approved by the Executive Board. ### Restriction on sharing the draft DSA - Staff cannot share the draft DSA document (or file) itself unless first endorsed by the Fund’s Executive Board, but may share parts of the underlying information subject to safeguards. - In surveillance and UFR contexts, a DSA forms part of an Executive Board document and is covered by the Transparency Policy and related guidance. - Country documents and parts thereof (draft or final) generally cannot be shared outside the Fund prior to Executive Board issuance and publication. - DSAs prepared in the context of capacity development (CD) are an exception to this rule; CD documents are not subject to Executive Board approval for publication purposes. ### Special considerations for sharing with the World Bank - LIC-DSFs are produced jointly; a special regime with well-documented rules governs engagement and information sharing with World Bank staff. Fund staff are expected to engage World Bank staff from early stages of missions and analysis. - For SRDSF, sharing country staff reports (including drafts) with World Bank staff prior to Fund Executive Board issuance is permitted under the Bank-Fund Concordat; mission chiefs generally retain discretion over sharing. ### Limits of the Fund’s role in restructurings - The Fund’s policies govern how it deals with different creditor classes (multilaterals, official bilateral creditors, private creditors). - Beyond policy requirements, the Fund does not prescribe burden sharing among creditors or enforce intercreditor equity. - The Fund will: - Define the perimeter of public debt for DSA purposes, - Classify claims for policy purposes, and - May take views on macroeconomic context (e.g., financial stability) that inform authorities’ decisions. - The Fund leaves the debt restructuring strategy, precise perimeter of claims to be treated, and specific terms of restructuring agreements to negotiations between creditors and debtor authorities. ### Information sharing across restructuring phases - Overarching principle: provide creditors enough information, especially once specific and credible financing assurances are needed, to enable them to produce restructuring scenarios that meet program financing parameters and debt sustainability targets. Phase One: Pre-Announcement - Before the debtor authorities announce their intention to seek a debt restructuring, the Fund should not share any non-public information with creditors. - Staff may assess debt as unsustainable in Article IV or UFR reports, but must not engage or share non-public information with creditors prior to the authorities’ announcement. - Published staff reports may be shared and referenced by staff. - For SRDSF users, staff cannot share information related to the mechanical signal on debt sustainability with creditors if that signal is not available in a published report. Phase Two: Post-Announcement, Up to an SLA - During program design, creditors often seek access to the information underlying the Fund’s DSA: - Staff or the authorities may share information demonstrating why debt is unsustainable (e.g., that debt or gross financing needs increase unsustainably over time or that another stress metric reaches unsafe levels). Such scenarios may be underpinned by staff’s preliminary calibration of the program macroframework. - Creditors will want to learn key macro parameters under a potential Fund-supported program to understand program design. - Staff can discuss preliminary views embodied in presented numbers but should signal they are mainly seeking creditor input at this stage. - Discussions may include views on macroeconomic variables, pace and size of market access, and confirmation of debt characteristics held by creditors. *Source: STAFF GUIDANCE NOTE ON INFORMATION SHARING IN THE CONTEXT OF SOVEREIGN DEBT RESTRUCTURINGS, June 6, 2023.* ### 14. Staff may at some point consider sharing, with the debtor authorities’ consent and ### 14. Staff may at some point consider sharing, with the debtor authorities’ consent and ### Conditional sharing of financing envelope and key financing assumptions - Staff may consider sharing, with the debtor authorities’ consent and subject to confidentiality safeguards, certain information on the financing envelope and key financing assumptions to reduce the likelihood of protracted negotiations by enhancing authorities’ credibility that the debtor needs the contribution the program may require to restore sustainability. - Preconditions and signals: - Staff should only take this step once comfortable that the program macro-framework is close to being stabilized. - Staff should clearly signal that the information being shared may be subject to change as the SLA is finalized. - Staff should signal a willingness to receive information from and hear the views of creditors. - Information that could be shared (subject to confidentiality safeguards): - Macroeconomic projections, including growth and inflation rate projections, balance of payment forecasts, exchange rate projections, monetary and central bank accounts in detail; staff should be prepared to explain the assumptions and analysis that underpin the forecasts. - Fiscal projections; staff should be prepared to explain the assumptions and analysis that underpin the forecast and the rationale for the fiscal targets. ### Phase Three: Post SLA, Up to Obtaining Assurances — greater information sharing - After reaching an SLA, a higher degree of information sharing may be necessary for creditors to agree to provide financing assurances and debt sustainability assurances or to conclude a restructuring agreement. - Additional information that can be shared subject to confidentiality safeguards: - Additional years of projections beyond what is usually included in the macroframework; and/or further disaggregation of data (e.g., for debt stock or debt service to individual creditors or between amortizations and interest payments). - Public debt targets relating to the program (such as the parameters that ensure debt sustainability, the medium-term targets for the stock and liquidity indicators, and average and maximum gross financing needs). - Modeling questions: staff may answer modeling questions from official bilateral creditors (e.g., range of magnitudes of the present value reduction that could deliver program targets and whether the program targets can be achieved without a nominal haircut). In responding, staff must make clear the response is technical and not a normative assessment from the Fund. Early technical engagement could help accelerate official bilateral creditors’ decision to join an official creditor committee. ### Subsequent review under a Fund arrangement - The higher degree of information sharing would carry over to a subsequent review under a Fund arrangement. - If circumstances warrant, Fund staff may need to update the macroeconomic framework. - General expectation: staff should not expect significant deviations in economic circumstances post-arrangement approval, and technical macro updates are generally not expected to lead to changes in program parameters (e.g., DSA landing zones or financing gap). - If there is a significant change in the macro environment, changes to program parameters and assumptions may be necessary and should be reviewed by departments and approved by Fund management prior to being shared. ### Situations and counterparties for broader information sharing (paragraph 17 examples) - With official bilateral creditors from whom specific and credible assurances are required: - If sharing is done in context of an established framework (e.g., the Paris Club or Common Framework), the process is more straightforward given the Fund’s good offices role and existing confidentiality understandings. - Staff’s default position should be to also share with non-Paris Club official creditors (or non-Common Framework official bilateral creditors) due to intercreditor equity considerations, subject to debtor authorities’ consent, confidentiality understandings, and creditor’s claims being critical to restore debt sustainability. - With multilateral creditors (World Bank Group outside LIC-DSF, other IFIs, RFAs): - Where a multilateral creditor is being asked to provide new money to fill financing gaps in a Fund-supported program, it may need access to data to better understand program parameters. - Staff can share a broader extent of data with these institutions due to long-standing relationships and confidentiality understandings; authorities’ consent remains important. - With private sector creditors: - Sharing broader information could raise confidentiality concerns and would require case-specific judgment (e.g., presence of a representative creditor committee with confidentiality safeguards). - Most importantly, information may only be shared where the debtor authorities consent and staff is ensured confidentiality will be maintained (e.g., shared with creditors’ advisors only). ### Sharing the Full DSA - There will be cases where staff judges that waiting to share the full DSA with creditors until Executive Board consideration of the Article IV or UFR staff report package would be detrimental (e.g., meaningful delay expected until Executive Board consideration). - Options for sharing the DSA with the Executive Board earlier so it can be published and made available to creditors (each requires the DSA be issued to the Executive Board before publication): - Modality 1: Request for DSA-related capacity development (CD) from the authorities; full discussion of the TA report with the authorities; provision of the TA report to Executive Directors for information, with authorities’ consent to publish. This was done for Argentina in 2020. Under CD dissemination policy, the DSA is provided to the Executive Board for information rather than endorsement. - Modality 2: Stand-alone DSA. Examples include standalone DSAs prepared for Greece in the UFR context in 2015 and in the surveillance context in 2016 that the Executive Board agreed to publish. Applicable in surveillance or program contexts. - Modality 3: Executive Board approval in principle (AIP) of the program. AIP can be recommended where staff and authorities have full agreement on policies and the only issue preventing arrangement approval is the need to catalyze creditor agreement on debt sustainability and/or financing assurances. Where AIP is granted, the member does not receive financing until the Fund determines debt sustainability is being restored upon receipt of financing assurances. The staff report including the DSA is presumed to be published under the transparency policy. This was done for Greece’s SBA in 2017. ### Information sharing in the surveillance context - Staff must be more circumspect in surveillance: - In the absence of a Fund-supported program and an MEFP, staff is generally not in a position to talk with precision about the authorities’ intended policies or their expected macroeconomic framework and thus cannot discuss what would make the situation sustainable in terms of debt targets. - Staff can discuss published surveillance work, covering staff’s views about the macroeconomic outlook and debt sustainability, and the assumptions that fed into this; staff should be clear these represent staff views. - In an ongoing Article IV consultation, staff should listen to creditors’ views to inform staff judgment about the outlook and debt sustainability and be clear that staff views, taking into account feedback from the authorities, are dispositive for preparing the DSA. - Authorities may request staff to more formally provide views via technical assistance (the first modality for full DSA sharing): (i) request for DSA-related CD; (ii) full discussion of the CD report with the authorities; (iii) provision of the CD report to the Executive Board for information, with authorities’ consent to publish (Argentina 2020 example). ### Information sharing with civil society - Authorities are encouraged to share information with civil society at each phase of the debt restructuring process and to listen to views, subject to: - Pre-debt restructuring announcement: same considerations as paragraph 12 for creditors apply; no non-public information should be shared. - Post-debt restructuring announcement: for all phases, authorities must proceed subject to confidentiality safeguards, as program discussions are confidential. Confidential or market sensitive information cannot be shared. - Staff and authorities may discuss any published information. - In surveillance contexts, the same considerations for creditors (paragraphs 20–21) apply to civil society. ### Process options for sharing a full Debt Sustainability Assessment (summarized) - Three modalities in Table 1: - Capacity Development (CD): Initiated at the request of the country authorities; content depends on scope of TA request; issued to the Executive Board for information; publication voluntary and subject to authorities’ consent; pros include enabling provision of a DSA outside a program context; cons include lack of Executive Board involvement potentially undermining legitimacy. - Standalone DSA: Initiated by Fund management or at authorities’ request; full, updated DSA with main findings; issued to the Executive Board for endorsement or information; access under the Fund’s Transparency Policy or Executive Board decision to publish. - AIP (Approval in Principle): Initiated by Fund management at the request of authorities; full set of program documents including staff report, DSA, LOI, MEFP and TMU; Executive Board issues formal consideration and decision for approval in principle; presumed to be published under the Transparency Policy; available in limited circumstances and requires full agreement on policies related to a Fund-supported program. ### Contact point - For questions related to sharing debt sustainability-related information and data, contact SPR Debt Policy management and the LEG working group on sovereign debt restructuring (LEGWGSDR). *Staff Guidance Note on Information Sharing in the Context of Sovereign Debt Restructurings, International Monetary Fund.* --- _Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/pp/2023/english/ppea2023027.pdf_