Training Program

This workshop is designed for technical-level staff in ministries of finance, national statistics agencies, central banks, tax administrations, or other relevant line ministries who use data and analytical tools to inform macroeconomic and fiscal policy.

Participants are expected to have an advanced degree in economics or finance, or equivalent work experience. Participants should be comfortable working with Excel/Stata and engaging in hands-on exercises, small-group discussions, and short presentations. Participants are encouraged to bring country-specific policy questions or data challenges that can be explored through the tools and approaches introduced during the workshop.

This workshop is designed to introduce participants to practical, hands-on tools for macro-structural analysis. The course will emphasize how to i) identify policy-relevant constraints to inclusive growth, ii) work with macro- and micro-level data, and iii) use applied toolkits to quantify potential macroeconomic implications and policy tradeoffs. Sessions will cover regional trends/demographic shifts, labor market indicators, household and survey-based data analysis, and tax-benefit analysis through the IMF's TaxFit tool.
Central to the workshop are hands-on exercises using publicly available data sources, practical Excel-based tools, and country examples. Participants will learn to access and interpret micro-level data, use dashboards to benchmark constraints and estimate economic costs, and apply TaxFit to examine the distributional and fiscal implications of tax-benefit reforms. The course will also include an introduction to macroeconomic modeling with distributional considerations, showing how micro-level data and labor-market heterogeneity can be incorporated into macro frameworks to assess the effects of policy reforms or structural constraints on labor supply, productivity, fiscal outcomes, growth, and distributional impacts. The workshop will culminate in short, team presentations applying the tools and materials to country-specific policy questions.