Training Program

Officials at central banks, ministries of finance and other agencies in charge of compiling monetary and financial statistics, government finance/debt statistics, and external sector statistics; and/or overseeing macro-financial analysis.

Participants are expected to have a degree in economics or statistics, or equivalent experience.

This course, conducted by the IMF Statistics Department, presents a user-friendly tool developed by the department to automatically combine monetary, government, and balance of payment data reported to the Statistics Department to create a distribution of claims and liabilities on a from-whom-to-whom basis—an extremely useful tool for macro-financial analysis. Once the matrix is generated, country officials should be able to use the Balance Sheet Approach (BSA) analysis to focus on overall balance sheet linkages and identify specific exposures and vulnerabilities, such as excessive reliance on external funding, leverage buildup in the corporate sector, and overreliance on the banking sector for sovereign debt placement. This course is an abbreviated version of the longer, BSA course traditionally offered by STA in-person.