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Budget Augmentation Framework
May 27, 2022
The membership and, in turn, the Fund face an inflection point as we work to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis and address the profound macroeconomic and financial implications of longer-term global challenges. The membership has called on the Fund to step up its work on identifying and managing the macro-critical impact of climate change, digitalization, inequality, and fragility, in close collaboration with partners. The Fund has a long history of agility, adapting in a cost-effective way to shifting needs, and is prepared to do so again, as highlighted in the Fall 2021 Global Policy Agenda. After a decade of real flat budgets, the IMFC has recognized the need to explore the appropriate budget envelope to ensure that the Fund has the staff and skills to continue to carry out its mandate in a changing global context.
Review of The Fund's Income Position for FY 2022 and FY 2023–2024
May 27, 2022
This paper updates the projections of the Fund’s income position for FY 2022 and FY 2023–2024 and proposes related decisions for the current financial year. The paper also includes a proposed decision to set the margin for the rate of charge for financial years 2023 and 2024.
FY2023-FY2025 Medium-Term Budget
May 27, 2022
The pandemic and war in Ukraine are weighing on the global economy. Uncertain monetary conditions are also complicating economic management. Members are addressing the fallout, often with constrained policy space, while also seeking a durable, inclusive structural transformation to address the macro-financial implications of climate change, digital money, fragility, and inequality.
IMF Executive Board Approves New Two-Year US$5.4 Billion Flexible Credit Line Arrangement for Peru
May 27, 2022
Blog: Chart of the WeekReal-Time Economic Indicators Help Better Track Activity in Africa
May 27, 2022
Economists are increasingly turning to new technologies that help track indicators such as growth and inflation in real time to sharpen their forecasts and offer better input for policymakers.
For Whom the Bell Tolls: Climate Change and Inequality
May 27, 2022
Climate change is the defining challenge of our time with complex and evolving dynamics. The effects of climate change on economic output and financial stability have received considerable attention, but there has been much less focus on the relationship between climate change and income inequality. In this paper, we provide new evidence on the association between climate change and income inequality, using a large panel of 158 countries during the period 1955–2019. We find that an increase in climate change vulnerability is positively associated with rising income inequality. More interestingly, splitting the sample into country groups reveals a considerable contrast in the impact of climate change on income inequality. While climate change vulnerability has no statistically significant effect on income distribution in advanced economies, the coefficient on climate change vulnerability is seven times greater and statistically highly significant in the case of developing countries due largely to weaker capacity for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Rogue Waves: Climate Change and Firm Performance
May 27, 2022
Climate change is an existential threat to the global economy and financial markets. There is a large body of literature documenting potential macroeconomic consequences of climate change, but firm-level empirical research on how climate change affects the performance of firms remains scarce. This paper aims to close this gap by empirically investigating the impact of climate change vulnerability on corporate performance using a large panel dataset of more than 3.3 million nonfinancial firms from 24 developing countries over the period 1997–2019. We find that nonfinancial firms operating in countries with greater vulnerability to climate change tend to experience difficulty in access to debt financing even at higher interest rates, while being less productive and profitable relative to firms in countries with lower vulnerability to climate change. We confirm these findings with alternative measures of climate change vulnerability. Furthermore, partitioning the sample reveals that these effects are significantly greater for smaller firms, especially in high-risk sectors and countries and countries with weaker capacity to adapt to and mitigate the consequences of climate change.
Jobs Impact of Green Energy
May 27, 2022
This brief paper accompanies the Green Energy and Jobs tool, which is a simple excel-based tool to estimate the job-creation potential of greening the electricity sector. Specifically, it calculates the net job gains or losses from increasing the level of energy efficiency, and from increasing the share of clean and renewable electricity generation in the total electricity output mix. The tool relies on estimates of job multipliers in the literature, and adds evidence from firm-level data on the job-intensity of different energy sources. The paper illustrates applications of the tool using data from the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario compared to business-as-usual. This tool is intended to help country teams engage further on climate change issues in bilateral surveillance.