IMF Notes

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IMF Notes

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IMF Publications

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• Current Issues in Forward Guidance
  • Published: August 25, 2026
  • Summary: Forward guidance, or forward-looking monetary policy, is an essential part of policymakers’ toolkits, yet there is a need to carefully define its scope.
• The Rise of Tokenization: Deciphering New Trends in Payments and Asset Tokenization
  • Published: July 1, 2026
  • Summary: Tokenization is an area of growing interest in financial services. At its core, it involves issuing assets, recording ownership, and transacting on a blockchain. While simple in concept, its implications for market structure, risk management, inclusion, and public policy are complex.
• Gold in Central Bank Reserves: Strategic Considerations, Market Risks, and Practical Guidance
  • Published: June 30, 2026
  • Summary: Gold has re-emerged as a prominent component of central bank reserves, largely reflecting valuation gains from higher gold prices rather than large-scale accumulation.
• Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity in the Financial Sector
  • Published: June 29, 2026
  • Summary: Artificial intelligence is reshaping cyber risk in the financial sector by accelerating the speed, frequency, and breadth of vulnerability discovery and potential exploitation.
• How Agentic AI Will Reshape Payments
  • Published: April 22, 2026
  • Summary: Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase in which systems can act autonomously on behalf of users. These “agentic” AI systems can interpret objectives, break them into tasks, and interact with digital services with limited human input.
• Tax Administration Reform in Greece: Outcomes and Lessons (2010–25)
  • Published: April 20, 2026
  • Summary: This Note documents Greece’s comprehensive tax administration reform journey over 2010–2025, showing how sustained reform under crisis conditions translated institutional change and digital innovation into durable revenue, compliance gains.
• Global Economic and Financial Implications of Artificial Intelligence: Lessons from a Scenario Planning Exercise
  • Published: April 3, 2026
  • Summary: This note synthesizes insights from a high-level workshop and scenario-planning exercise on the global economic and financial implications of artificial intelligence (AI) hosted by the IMF in December 2025.
• Tokenized Finance
  • Published: April 1, 2026
  • Summary: Tokenization—the representation of financial assets and liabilities on programmable digital ledgers—is increasingly shaping financial system developments.
• Making European Reforms a Success on the Ground
  • Published: November 13, 2025
  • Summary: Europe’s medium-term growth prospects remain subdued. There is broad recognition that growth need not be this low, and there is also a common understanding of what is standing in the way. Yet, decisive policy action has been lacking.
• How Can Europe Pay for Things That It Can't Afford?
  • Published: November 4, 2025
  • Summary: Europe has managed major shocks, but growth is slowing, export gains are reversing due to tariffs, and bond markets reflect rising risks. Interest rate cuts and increased fiscal spending, including defense, have not spurred private demand.
• Reforming Energy Subsidies in the Arab Region
  • Published: October 9, 2025
  • Summary: Energy subsidies—on fuel, gas, and electricity—remain prevalent across the Arab world, with substantial fiscal, economic, and environmental cost. Arab countries where energy subsidies are more prevalent tend to see, on average, lower productivity growth.
• Breaking the Trend: Debt Stabilization in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Published: April 25, 2025
  • Summary: Historical experience suggests that stabilizing debt across sub-Saharan Africa is still achievable in most cases, even though debt levels are elevated and vulnerabilities are high.
• Pushed to the Brink: Fragility and Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Published: April 25, 2025
  • Summary: Sub-Saharan Africa is home to nearly half of the world’s fragile and conflict-affected states, where weak institutions and social cohesion, governance failures, and economic instability trap millions in poverty.
• Agricultural Producer Subsidies: Navigating Challenges and Policy Considerations
  • Published: August 26, 2024
  • Summary: The objectives underlying agricultural output subsidies can have conflicting implications for the design of subsidy programs. As they tend to affect meaningful swaths of the electorate, subsidies can also be an attractive political instrument.
• Digital Money, Cross-Border Payments, International Reserves, and the Global Financial Safety Net: Preliminary Considerations
  • Published: January 4, 2024
  • Summary: The rapid advent of digital money (DM) and assets raises questions about its implications for the functioning of the international monetary system (IMS).
• Exploring the Adoption of Selected Digital Technologies in Tax Administration: A Cross-Country Perspective
  • Published: December 11, 2023
  • Summary: Using cross-country data, this note explores the potential impact of selected digital technologies on tax collection and compliance.
• Expanding and Improving Social Safety Nets Through Digitalization: Conceptual Framework and Review of Country Experiences
  • Published: December 7, 2023
  • Summary: Social safety nets (SSNs) are focal policies that support poor and vulnerable households, most prominently through cash transfers. However, strong discrepancies persist across countries in terms of spending, coverage, and targeting of SSNs, with larger gaps often found in low-income countries.
• Digital Interventions in the Health Sector: Country Cases and Policy Discussions
  • Published: October 30, 2023
  • Summary: This note discusses, through selected country case studies, how digital health records and telemedicine can improve delivery quality, access to underserved populations, and resource utilization in healthcare.
• Fiscal Revenue Mobilization and Digitally Traded Products: Taxing at the Border or Behind It?
  • Published: September 7, 2023
  • Summary: Digitalization has the potential to bring great economic benefits, but it is also creating new challenges. This note focuses on trade in digitized products, its fiscal revenue implications, and the appropriate role for domestic and border tax instruments in this context.
• The Political Economy of GovTech
  • Published: July 21, 2023
  • Summary: The digitalization of public services, known as GovTech, can disrupt traditional mechanisms to promote economic development (for example, financial inclusion, education, and health care), improve the delivery of public services, and expedite development objectives.
• Global Food Crisis Update: Recent Developments, Outlook, and IMF Engagement
  • Published: April 12, 2023
  • Summary: The global food crisis remains a major challenge. Food insecurity fueled by widely experienced increases in the cost of living has become a growing concern especially in low-income countries, even if price pressures on global food markets have softened somewhat since the onset of Russia’s war in Ukr
• Internet Adoption Trends during COVID-19
  • Published: March 31, 2023
  • Summary: This paper examines the common perception that internet adoption accelerated globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data show little evidence of a faster expansion of access to internet (extensive margin) across all country income groups but strong evidence of acceleration in the improvement in
• Tackling the Global Food Crisis: Impact, Policy Response, and the Role of the IMF
  • Published: September 27, 2022
  • Summary: Russia’s war in Ukraine has exacerbated food insecurity that had already been on the rise for half a decade. Low-income countries are affected the most.
• Policies to Address the Refugee Crisis in Europe Related to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
  • Published: September 8, 2022
  • Summary: Refugees from Ukraine face multiple vulnerabilities, with many requiring humanitarian assistance to meet basic needs. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, host countries in Europe and beyond have adopted measures to support refugees, including residency rights, free movement across countries
• Taxing Windfall Profits in the Energy Sector
  • Published: August 30, 2022
  • Summary: The surge in fossil fuel prices in 2022 has generated substantial windfall profits in the energy sector. Policymakers in many countries are exploring policies to tax part of these profits.
• Fiscal Policy for Mitigating the Social Impact of High Energy and Food Prices
  • Published: June 7, 2022
  • Summary: Fiscal policy has a crucial role in lessening the impact on the most vulnerable households. Governments must balance by ensuring access to energy and food, normalizing fiscal policy after unprecedented support in 2020, and promoting green transformation.