Low-Income Countries
The IMF has acted with unprecedented speed and scale to support low-income countries during the pandemic. The Fund provided financial support to 53 of 69 eligible low-income countries in 2020 and in the first half of 2021, with about US$14 billion disbursed as zero percent interest rate loans from the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust.
Most of this support was through the Fund’s emergency financing instruments—the Rapid Credit Facility (RCF) and Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI)—which provide immediate, one-time disbursements to countries facing urgent balance of payments needs. The Fund was able to respond to a record number of requests for financial assistance through a series of temporary access limit increases to the RCF and RFI, and temporary increases in the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) overall access limits.
The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund concluded the 2026 Article IV consultation with Trinidad and Tobago.
The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded the Article IV consultation with Peru on May 15, 2026.
The Burundian authorities have taken important policy steps to stabilize the economy and reduce imbalances, in line with the macroeconomic strategy they adopted last year and with the authorities’ broader national reform agenda. Growth accelerated in 2025 and inflation declined sharply.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - May 18, 2026: Jihad Azour, Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Catriona Purfield, Director of the Institute for Capacity Development, issued a statement following a visit to Saudi Arabia:
IMF Staff Completes the 2026 Article IV Mission to Singapore
Kiribati’s recent GDP growth has exceeded that of other Pacific Island countries and poverty has declined significantly. Growth is projected to moderate to about 3.1 percent in 2026 but the outlook remains highly uncertain amid external shocks and persistent structural challenges.
Resilience, supervision, and international coordination are essential to safeguarding global financial markets as new AI tools enable attackers
Fiscal pressures in developing countries make stronger domestic revenue systems more important than ever
Shipping and flight disruptions highlight new fault lines in the global economy and their costs for growth and livelihoods
To weather the shock, policymakers should ensure that any near-term measures are time-bound and targeted at the most vulnerable, and maintain the focus on medium-term development objectives
Countries face vastly different exposure to higher oil prices and supply uncertainty, shaped by whether they import or export, and how much policy space they have to respond
Impact on economic activity will vary across countries, but inflation will rise for all
On May 8, 2026, the IMF’s Executive Board approved another six-month extension of the period to consent to the quota increase and to the New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB) rollback under the Sixteenth General Review of Quotas (GRQ), through November 15, 2026. Such extension also extends the period of consent for quota increases under the Fourteenth GRQ. The previous deadline was due to expire on May 15, 2026. However, the Board of Governors Resolution No. 79-1 provides that the Executive Board may extend the period for consent as it may determine.
This paper updates the projections of the Fund’s income position for FY 2026 and FY 2027–2028 and proposes related decisions for the current and the following financial years. The paper includes proposed decisions to transfer SDR 1.38 billion of GRA resources to the Interim Placement Administered Account and to transfer estimated Fixed Income income and a payout from the Endowment Subaccount to help meet administrative expenses. It also includes a proposed decision to keep the margin for the rate of charge unchanged at 60 basis points for FY 2027–2028. The Fund’s total comprehensive income for FY 2026 is projected at about SDR 3.8 billion; reflecting an estimated pension-related remeasurement gain and retained income in the Investment Account. The Executive Board approved these decisions on April 28; 2026.
The global economic and financial environment is characterized by profound transformation and heightened uncertainty, including that stemming from the war in the Middle East. In this context, demand for Fund engagement is expected to remain strong, continuing to require difficult trade-offs within a real flat budget. The FY27-29 budget maintains a longstanding emphasis on discipline, focus, and agility in line with the evolving needs of the membership. Implementation of a Fund-wide streamlining exercise is reinforcing ongoing department-level prioritization to create space for the highest priority needs, relieve staff work pressures, and maintain capacity for unforeseen demands.
The Integrated Policy Framework (IPF) assists IMF staff in providing advice on the joint use of foreign exchange intervention (FXI), macroprudential measures (MPMs), and capital flow management measures (CFMs), alongside standard monetary and fiscal policies. This note provides overarching considerations in applying the IPF to low-income countries (LICs), building on previous Fund advice.
Diriyah Guiding Principles on IMF Quota and Governance Reforms
Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM is central to achieving sustainable financing for development, building fiscal buffers, and strengthening state capacity. Recent work by the IMF and the World Bank shows that many countries—especially low-income countries (LICs) and fragile and conflict-affected states (FCSs)—are still collecting less than 15 percent of GDP in tax revenue. World Bank and IMF research suggests that collection beyond this threshold is linked to lasting improvements in growth, public service delivery, and state capacity. DRM—central to the IMF-WBG three pillar approach to helping countries address liquidity challenges (IMF and World Bank 2024a)—is crucial for building fiscal space to advance public spending for development, reduce reliance on volatile external financing, support jobs and growth, and strengthen the social contract between the state and its citizens.
We document the state-dependence of monetary policy transmission to output and core consumer prices in a sample of eleven large inflation-targeting emerging markets along three cyclical dimensions: the business cycle position, the monetary policy stance, and the level of trend inflation. We show that monetary policy has strong effects on output during recessions and after a period of loose monetary policy, but little to no impact during expansions or when monetary policy has been tight. In contrast, the response of prices is muted regardless of business cycle position or monetary policy stance. Transmission also depends on trend inflation: when trend inflation is low, monetary policy has a stronger impact on output and a weaker effect on prices, whereas a high-inflation environment dampens the output response and amplifies price adjustments. These findings are broadly consistent with the presence of financial frictions in the form of occasionally binding borrowing constraints, endogenous frequency of price adjustments, loss aversion preferences, and a convex Phillips Curve.
This paper presents an updated version of the Laeven and Valencia (2013, 2020) database on systemic banking crises, extending the coverage through 2025. The update incorporates new episodes, while maintaining the definition established in previous editions, which emphasizes both significant signs of financial distress and substantial policy interventions. The update integrates textual tools to screen potential candidates that are then further scrutinized to confirm if our definition is met. The database includes information on banking crises episodes during 1970-2025, including starting dates, policy responses, fiscal costs, and output losses. It offers a comprehensive tool for assessing cross-country vulnerabilities and policies to resolve banking crises.
Employing large language models to analyze official documents, we construct a comprehensive record of daily changes in de jure restrictions on cross-border flows worldwide since the 1950s. Our analysis uncovers the wide array of instruments used to regulate cross-border financial flows over the past seven decades, leveraging the fine granularity of the new measures to characterize cross-country and time-series variation across eight categories of restrictions —- distinguishing by flow, direction, instrument type, intensity, and overall policy stance. We exploit the high frequency nature of the new data to document novel patterns in the use of these restrictions, as well as their relationship to crises and political economy determinants.
When countries are hit by supply shocks, central banks often face the dilemma of either looking through such shocks or reacting to them to ensure that inflation expectations remain anchored. In this paper, we propose a tractable framework to capture this dilemma and explore optimal policy under various assumptions on how agents form their expectations and the sophistication with which those expectations account for the central bank’s announced policies. While our analysis covers a wide range of potential specifications, our baseline results focus on level-k thinking (LKT) – a form of bounded rationality that enjoys significant support in the experimental literature and encompasses both adaptive expectations (AE) and rational expectations (RE) as special cases. Nonetheless, we show that the optimal policy under LKT is qualitatively very different from its analogues under AE and RE, exhibiting abrupt pivots in the policy stance. In particular, it is optimal for the central bank to initially look through supply shocks until a threshold is reached, then pivot discontinuously to a more hawkish anti-inflationary stance. We find that such pivots can, if optimally executed, be compatible with soft landings in the sense that most (or even all) of the reduction in inflation occurs through re-anchoring of expectations rather than economic slack. We also discuss risks and why policy errors in terms of tightening too late or too slowly can be especially costly in such an environment.
This paper analyzes trade patterns across the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)—15 Caribbean countries—and makes three main contributions. First, it provides a unified empirical assessment of Caribbean external connectivity by jointly analyzing goods trade, tourism flows, and cross-border banking linkages within a consistent gravity-model framework. Second, it presents new evidence on the role of physical connectivity—shipping and air transport—in shaping both import source concentration and tourism inflows, drawing on granular bilateral trade, tourism, and flight capacity data. Third, it shows that, while financial connectivity matters in a global context, it is not the primary binding constraint for Caribbean economies; instead, limited physical connectivity emerges as the more decisive factor shaping trade patterns and external vulnerabilities.
Using a newly constructed database of highly granular regional-level budgets, this paper documents the growing relevance of regional governments in Latin America over the past three decades and evaluates the implications for fiscal cyclicality. We find that regional governments exhibit lower revenue elasticity to national GDP than central governments, primarily due to the limited cyclicality of transfers. On the expenditure side, while overall elasticity is comparable to central governments, fiscal adjustment occurs through capital expenditures. We also show that transfers appear to operate primarily as redistribution mechanisms across regions rather than as instruments to offset differences in tax capacity.
