Balance Sheet Approach (BSA)

Source details

Session No.: AT 26.26
Location: Ebene, Mauritius
Date: September 14-18, 2026 (1 week) New dates
Delivery Method: In-person Training
Primary Language: English
Interpretation Language: French
Qualifications: Participants are expected to have a degree in economics or statistics, or equivalent experience.

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.

The course provides participants with the necessary skills to compile and analyze the BSA matrix (three-dimensional financial statistics).
The BSA allows 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.
The course presents a user-friendly BSA tool developed by the IMF, which:
- 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;
- serves as an analytical tool for macro-financial analysis.
Country officials will identify critical data gaps, if any, for their respective countries through the process of creating a BSA matrix using their own data submission of financial, fiscal, and external sector statistics to the IMF.

Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:
- 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.