Comprehensive Surveillance Review
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Purpose and Goals
- The IMF is adapting and strengthening its economic analysis of countries, known as surveillance, to help policymakers better prepare for a transforming economic landscape.
- The review takes a broad and long view to:
- Help policymakers respond to risks and uncertainty.
- Protect global financial stability.
- Strengthen inclusive growth.
- Better understand interactions between the financial sector and the economy.
Core Elements of IMF Surveillance
- Article IV consultations will continue to cover fiscal, monetary, exchange rate and financial issues, which are at the heart of the Fund’s work.
- Going forward, surveillance will give more timely and targeted policy advice on issues shaped by climate change, digital technology, inequality, and global events like the pandemic.
- The review emphasizes selectivity and country-specific choices given the wide range of issues related to economic sustainability.
Review Structure and Key Papers
- The Comprehensive Surveillance Review comprises ten policy papers organized to set priorities and modalities for modernizing surveillance, plus background papers that examine specific priorities and tools.
- Overview Paper:
- Takes stock of the current economic and financial landscape and sets out four priorities.
- Modalities for Modernizing Surveillance:
- Calls for surveillance that is more targeted, topical and timely, better interconnected, and better informed.
- Emphasizes tailoring policy advice, strengthening peer-learning, integrating macrofinancial analysis, and being supported by more and better data and tools.
- Implementation will be characterized by experimentation and learning-by-doing.
Background Papers — Surveillance Priorities and Analytical Focus
- The Surveillance Priority Confronting Risks and Uncertainties:
- Since the global financial crisis, staff reports regularly identify major risks and provide assessments summarized in Risk Assessment Matrices.
- Proposes increased emphasis on the range of potential outcomes to improve policy design and more proactive policy advice on how to manage risks.
- The Surveillance Priority Preempting and Mitigating Spillovers:
- The IMF has a range of modalities and tools to cover spillovers.
- Identifies scope to enhance synergies between global and country-specific spillover coverage and to foster cross-country dialogue, enabling more coordinated and evenhanded surveillance of spillovers.
- The Surveillance Priority Ensuring Economic Sustainability:
- Frames economic sustainability as central to the IMF’s mandate to maintain present and prospective balance of payments and domestic stability, assure orderly exchange arrangements, and promote a stable system of exchange rates.
- Argues for a broad perspective and long time horizon while maintaining selectivity and case-by-case issue choices.
- Integrating Climate Change into Article IV Consultations:
- Notes IMF involvement in the climate debate since at least 2008.
- Proposes a pragmatic approach focusing especially on mitigation efforts of the 20 largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
- Systemic Risk and Macroprudential Policy Advice in Article IV Consultations:
- Assesses progress in deepening and integrating systemic risk analysis and macroprudential policy advice in Article IV consultations, following up on the findings of the Independent Evaluation Office evaluation.
- Traction:
- Presents traction as a multidimensional concept and discusses approaches to measure the Fund’s value added to policy dialogue, formulation, and public debate in member countries.
- Scenario Planning:
- Uses scenario exercises to draw out surveillance priorities and stress test their robustness to uncertainties in the decade ahead.
- Illustrates how different shocks and alternative policy approaches carry their own risks and can have both positive and negative spillovers.
- Background Paper on Main Findings from The Stakeholder Surveys:
- Presents key results from surveys of country authorities, IMF Executive Directors, and mission chiefs.
- Identifies cross-cutting themes: Trends, Policy Challenges, Surveillance Priorities, Surveillance Modalities, and Traction.
Guidance and Implementation Notes
- Guidance Note for Surveillance Under Article IV Consultations — June 23, 2022:
- Provides guidance to country teams for surveillance under Article IV consultations.
- Supersedes the 2015 Guidance Note and its supplement.
- Implements priorities identified by the 2021 Comprehensive Surveillance Review (CSR) in both content and modalities.
- Supplement to the Guidance Note for Surveillance Under Article IV Consultations — February 8, 2021:
- Provides updated guidance to country teams on bilateral surveillance in the context of Article IV consultations in light of the COVID crisis.
- Affects the focus, format and presentation of staff reports while keeping intact the substance of all existing Board-endorsed requirements.
Historical Context
- 2021 Comprehensive Surveillance Review — May 18, 2021.
- 2018 Interim Surveillance Review — April 17, 2018:
- Found that Fund surveillance had become better adapted to the global conjuncture, and more integrated and risk-based.
- Built on recommendations of the 2014 Triennial Surveillance Review (TSR), which focused on helping members navigate post-crisis challenges.
References