IMF Staff Country Reports

This technical assistant report on South Africa focuses on monetary and financial statistics (duty station-based) mission. The mission developed bridge tables from the source data of money market funds (MMFs), the Land Bank, and Ithala SOC to 2SR. The mission estimated that reclassifying the MMFs from the Other Financial Corporations to the Other Depository Corporations sector would increase broad money by two to three percent. Once the reclassification takes place, the mission recommended that the Economic Statistics Department prepare a methodological note explaining the impact on monetary aggregates. Some problems were detected with the grouping of accounts as an intermediate step to produce the bridge table. Clustering individual accounts has the risk of misclassifying deposit accounts in overdraft. As already stated, deposit accounts in overdraft should be classified as loans, not netted against the balances of other account holders. In order to support progress in the above work areas, the mission recommended a detailed action plan with the priority recommendations summarized in a table. A period for completing these recommendations was discussed and agreed in principle with the authorities.