As the climate crisis becomes increasingly urgent, immediate global action is needed to achieve the temperature and adaptation goals of the Paris Agreement. Key components of this action will be articulating climate policies at the country and regional levels, strengthening the climate information architecture, and scaling up climate investment. This event, jointly hosted by the World Bank and the IMF, will explore innovative ways countries can deliver significant impacts that improve people’s quality of life, through policies that accelerate low-carbon and resilient growth to better draw in the private sector and attract more climate finance.
Event DetailsMany countries have been hit hard by the shocks of recent years, especially low-income countries grappling with multiple challenges—including rapid inflation, food insecurity, costly borrowing, and mounting debt. When these countries needed to formulate policy responses, their external and fiscal space was already running low after the pandemic. Now, they are faced with a funding squeeze, with aid and access to private finance drying up, that is delaying the recovery and undermining future growth prospects. This threatens to reverse a decades-long trend of steadily converging living standards. This seminar will discuss how countries can overcome the funding squeeze and build a more resilient future growth path and, in particular, explore the role the international community can play with well-coordinated policy advice, capacity building, and financial support. The discussion will also highlight the IMF’s engagement with these countries under its Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust, and how IMF concessional financing plays a key role in helping these countries cushion the impact on growth from ongoing shocks and future crises.
Event DetailsAmid record high debt levels and rising costs of servicing debt, many countries face growing pressures to raise additional resources to sustain the role of the public sector. The panel will focus on the need to boost revenues, reprioritize expenditure and deepen domestic funding markets, to support essential spending across the membership, and to meet new and emerging commitments (infrastructure, green transition, security, ageing, industrial policies). The discussion will consider how to raise domestic resources in an economically sustainable manner, that imposes the least economic cost in terms of efficiency. The panel will also examine how to take advantage of emerging digital technologies and revenue sources.
Event DetailsEmerging market and developing economies are grappling with economic scarring and limited policy flexibility in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Decisive policy measures are urgently required to revive growth and address crucial transitions such as the green shift, digitalization, and technological advancements. However, surging public debt and persistent inflation impose constraints and present challenging policy trade-offs. The seminar explores the renewed need for well-designed and sequenced structural reforms—those aimed at improving the fundamentals of an economy—as a pivotal tool in accelerating growth and fostering sustainable structural transformations while mitigating immediate macro-policy trade-offs.
Event DetailsMany countries, especially low-income and emerging economies, are suffering under the weight of high debt. Large debt burdens constrain countries’ capacity to invest in areas such as education, health, social protection, or infrastructure. For some, debt is already unsustainable. This seminar will explore options to boost resilience to debt risks, including through domestic reforms to enhance growth, improve expenditure policies and domestic revenue mobilization, and strengthen debt management. It will also discuss the need for scaled-up support from the global community through the provision of concessional finance and technical assistance to underpin domestic reform / policy changes, as well as improvements in sovereign debt restructuring processes to ensure debt relief can be delivered in a timely and predictable manner when needed.
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IMF's Gita Gopinath discusses how emerging markets can navigate a volatile and uncertain external landscape at the South Africa Reserve Bank Biennial Conference.
Event DetailsIMF Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas presents the latest forecast for the global economy. July 25 at 9:00 AM ET.
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