Training Program Course
Balance Sheet Approach (BSA)
This course provides participants with the necessary skills to compile and analyze the BSA matrix - i.e. three-dimensional financial statistics. The BSA allows participants to examine overall balance sheet linkages and identify, as well as evaluate specific exposures and vulnerabilities, such as an excessive reliance on external funding, leverage buildup in the corporate sector, excessive household debt, and overreliance on the banking sector for sovereign debt placement. The course presents a user-friendly BSA tool developed by the IMF, which combines the balance sheets of the financial sector, general government, and the external sector into a single matrix to generate a distribution of claims and liabilities on a from-whom-to-whom basis-an extremely useful tool for macro-financial analysis. Country officials identify critical data gaps, if any, for their respective countries through the process of creating a BSA matrix using their own data submission of financial, fiscal, and external sector statistics to the IMF.
Target Audience
Officials at central banks, ministries of finance and other agencies responsible for (i) compiling monetary and financial statistics, government finance and debt statistics, and external sector statistics; (ii) the supervision and regulation of financial institutions; and (iii) conducting financial stability or macro-financial analyses.
Qualifications
Participants are expected to have a degree in economics or statistics, or equivalent experience.
Course Objectives
Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:
- Derive the BSA matrix using monetary, government, and external sector data.
- Review and assess the source data used for preparing the BSA matrix, while examining the critical data gaps for their respective countries.
- Prepare work plans for addressing these data gaps over the medium-term, in order to provide national policy makers with an analytically useful BSA matrix.
- Analyze the BSA matrix information for identifying vulnerabilities, risk buildup, and potential spillovers stemming from key balance sheet linkages among different sectors of an economy and with the rest of the world.