{
  "title": "Comprehensive Surveillance Review",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.imf.org/en/topics/comprehensive-surveillance-review",
  "canonical": "https://www.imf.org/en/topics/comprehensive-surveillance-review",
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  "summary": "The IMF is adapting and strengthening its economic analysis of countries, known as surveillance. To keep up with the changes in the world, the IMF is modernizing surveillance to help policymakers better prepare for a transforming economic landscape.",
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "Purpose and Goals",
      "content": "- The IMF is adapting and strengthening its economic analysis of countries, known as surveillance, to help policymakers better prepare for a transforming economic landscape.\n- The review takes a broad and long view to:\n  - Help policymakers respond to risks and uncertainty.\n  - Protect global financial stability.\n  - Strengthen inclusive growth.\n  - Better understand interactions between the financial sector and the economy."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Core Elements of IMF Surveillance",
      "content": "- Article IV consultations will continue to cover fiscal, monetary, exchange rate and financial issues, which are at the heart of the Fund’s work.\n- Going forward, surveillance will give more timely and targeted policy advice on issues shaped by climate change, digital technology, inequality, and global events like the pandemic.\n- The review emphasizes selectivity and country-specific choices given the wide range of issues related to economic sustainability."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Review Structure and Key Papers",
      "content": "- The Comprehensive Surveillance Review comprises ten policy papers organized to set priorities and modalities for modernizing surveillance, plus background papers that examine specific priorities and tools.\n- Overview Paper:\n  - Takes stock of the current economic and financial landscape and sets out four priorities.\n- Modalities for Modernizing Surveillance:\n  - Calls for surveillance that is more targeted, topical and timely, better interconnected, and better informed.\n  - Emphasizes tailoring policy advice, strengthening peer-learning, integrating macrofinancial analysis, and being supported by more and better data and tools.\n  - Implementation will be characterized by experimentation and learning-by-doing."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Background Papers — Surveillance Priorities and Analytical Focus",
      "content": "- The Surveillance Priority Confronting Risks and Uncertainties:\n  - Since the global financial crisis, staff reports regularly identify major risks and provide assessments summarized in Risk Assessment Matrices.\n  - Proposes increased emphasis on the range of potential outcomes to improve policy design and more proactive policy advice on how to manage risks.\n- The Surveillance Priority Preempting and Mitigating Spillovers:\n  - The IMF has a range of modalities and tools to cover spillovers.\n  - Identifies scope to enhance synergies between global and country-specific spillover coverage and to foster cross-country dialogue, enabling more coordinated and evenhanded surveillance of spillovers.\n- The Surveillance Priority Ensuring Economic Sustainability:\n  - Frames economic sustainability as central to the IMF’s mandate to maintain present and prospective balance of payments and domestic stability, assure orderly exchange arrangements, and promote a stable system of exchange rates.\n  - Argues for a broad perspective and long time horizon while maintaining selectivity and case-by-case issue choices.\n- Integrating Climate Change into Article IV Consultations:\n  - Notes IMF involvement in the climate debate since at least 2008.\n  - Proposes a pragmatic approach focusing especially on mitigation efforts of the 20 largest emitters of greenhouse gases.\n- Systemic Risk and Macroprudential Policy Advice in Article IV Consultations:\n  - Assesses progress in deepening and integrating systemic risk analysis and macroprudential policy advice in Article IV consultations, following up on the findings of the Independent Evaluation Office evaluation.\n- Traction:\n  - Presents traction as a multidimensional concept and discusses approaches to measure the Fund’s value added to policy dialogue, formulation, and public debate in member countries.\n- Scenario Planning:\n  - Uses scenario exercises to draw out surveillance priorities and stress test their robustness to uncertainties in the decade ahead.\n  - Illustrates how different shocks and alternative policy approaches carry their own risks and can have both positive and negative spillovers.\n- Background Paper on Main Findings from The Stakeholder Surveys:\n  - Presents key results from surveys of country authorities, IMF Executive Directors, and mission chiefs.\n  - Identifies cross-cutting themes: Trends, Policy Challenges, Surveillance Priorities, Surveillance Modalities, and Traction."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Guidance and Implementation Notes",
      "content": "- Guidance Note for Surveillance Under Article IV Consultations — June 23, 2022:\n  - Provides guidance to country teams for surveillance under Article IV consultations.\n  - Supersedes the 2015 Guidance Note and its supplement.\n  - Implements priorities identified by the 2021 Comprehensive Surveillance Review (CSR) in both content and modalities.\n- Supplement to the Guidance Note for Surveillance Under Article IV Consultations — February 8, 2021:\n  - Provides updated guidance to country teams on bilateral surveillance in the context of Article IV consultations in light of the COVID crisis.\n  - Affects the focus, format and presentation of staff reports while keeping intact the substance of all existing Board-endorsed requirements."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Historical Context",
      "content": "- 2021 Comprehensive Surveillance Review — May 18, 2021.\n- 2018 Interim Surveillance Review — April 17, 2018:\n  - Found that Fund surveillance had become better adapted to the global conjuncture, and more integrated and risk-based.\n  - Built on recommendations of the 2014 Triennial Surveillance Review (TSR), which focused on helping members navigate post-crisis challenges."
    }
  ],
  "bullets": [
    "The IMF is adapting and strengthening its economic analysis of countries, known as surveillance, to help policymakers better prepare for a transforming economic landscape.",
    "The review takes a broad and long view to:",
    "Article IV consultations will continue to cover fiscal, monetary, exchange rate and financial issues, which are at the heart of the Fund’s work.",
    "Going forward, surveillance will give more timely and targeted policy advice on issues shaped by climate change, digital technology, inequality, and global events like the pandemic.",
    "The review emphasizes selectivity and country-specific choices given the wide range of issues related to economic sustainability.",
    "The Comprehensive Surveillance Review comprises ten policy papers organized to set priorities and modalities for modernizing surveillance, plus background papers that examine specific priorities and tools.",
    "Overview Paper:",
    "Modalities for Modernizing Surveillance:",
    "The Surveillance Priority Confronting Risks and Uncertainties:",
    "The Surveillance Priority Preempting and Mitigating Spillovers:",
    "The Surveillance Priority Ensuring Economic Sustainability:",
    "Integrating Climate Change into Article IV Consultations:",
    "Systemic Risk and Macroprudential Policy Advice in Article IV Consultations:",
    "Traction:",
    "Scenario Planning:",
    "Background Paper on Main Findings from The Stakeholder Surveys:",
    "Guidance Note for Surveillance Under Article IV Consultations — June 23, 2022:",
    "Supplement to the Guidance Note for Surveillance Under Article IV Consultations — February 8, 2021:",
    "2021 Comprehensive Surveillance Review — May 18, 2021.",
    "2018 Interim Surveillance Review — April 17, 2018:"
  ],
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  "generatedAtUtc": "2026-10-01T20:25:47.550Z"
}