Balance Sheet Approach (BSA)

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Balance Sheet Approach (BSA)

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Bibliographic details

• Published: July 24, 2025

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Course overview

• Provides participants with the necessary skills to compile and analyze the BSA matrix — i.e., three-dimensional financial statistics.
• Enables examination of overall balance sheet linkages and identification and evaluation of specific exposures and vulnerabilities, such as:
  • an excessive reliance on external funding,
  • leverage buildup in the corporate sector,
  • excessive household debt,
  • overreliance on the banking sector for sovereign debt placement.
• Presents a user-friendly BSA tool developed by the IMF that combines the balance sheets of the financial sector, general government, and the external sector into a single matrix to generate a distribution of claims and liabilities on a from-whom-to-whom basis.
• Course activities include creating a BSA matrix using participants’ own data submissions of financial, fiscal, and external sector statistics to the IMF, enabling country officials to identify critical data gaps.

Target audience and qualifications

• Target audience:
  • Officials at central banks, ministries of finance and other agencies responsible for:
  • compiling monetary and financial statistics, government finance and debt statistics, and external sector statistics;
  • the supervision and regulation of financial institutions;
  • conducting financial stability or macro-financial analyses.
• Qualifications:
  • Participants are expected to have a degree in economics or statistics, or equivalent experience.

Course objectives

• Derive the BSA matrix using monetary, government, and external sector data.
• Review and assess the source data used for preparing the BSA matrix, while examining the 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.
• Analyze the BSA matrix information for identifying vulnerabilities, risk buildup, and potential spillovers stemming from key balance sheet linkages among different sectors of an economy and with the rest of the world.

Skills and analytical outcomes

• Practical skills to compile three-dimensional financial statistics (BSA matrix).
• Capacity to map inter-sectoral and external linkages using a from-whom-to-whom framework.
• Ability to pinpoint and prioritize data gaps and formulate medium-term plans to improve national statistical systems for macro-financial analysis.

References

• In-person Training
• AT 26.26