Balance Sheet Approach

Source details

Training program offered by the Statistics Department of the IMF.
Target audience:
- 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.
- Officials overseeing macro-financial analysis.

Qualifications: Participants are expected to have a degree in economics or statistics, or equivalent experience.
Enrollment status: Deadline passed.

The course presents a user-friendly tool developed by the Statistics Department to automatically combine monetary, government, and international investment position data reported to the Statistics Department to create a distribution of claims and liabilities on a from-whom-to-whom basis.
The generated matrix is intended as an analytical tool for macro-financial analysis to:
- Focus on overall balance sheet linkages.
- 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.

Upon completion of the course, participants should be able to:

Use the BSA matrix information for the identification of balance sheet imbalances, exposures, and risks to shocks such as sudden capital outflows or sharp exchange rate depreciation.
Review and summarize the source data used for preparing the BSA matrix and identify 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.