IMF Executive Board Approves 48-Month US$4 Billion Extended Fund Facility Arrangement for Ecuador
May 31, 2024
Islamic Republic of Mauritania: Climate Mitigation Policy Diagnostic
May 31, 2024
Mauritania requested capacity development from the Fiscal Affairs Department on carbon taxation, fossil fuel pricing and fiscal aspects of hydrogen development. This is a high-level summary of the technical assistant and the recommendations provided to the authorities. The report assesses options to gradually introduce a carbon tax to bring the country in line with its Nationally Determined Contribution for 2030 and net-zero pledge for 2050, including targeted support for vulnerable households. It then reviews approach to price fossil fuel products and proposes a revised methodology better aligned with international petroleum markets, along with a fiscally neutral smoothing mechanism to mitigate the impact of abrupt price changes on Mauritanian consumers. Finally, the report evaluates fiscal aspects related to the development of the low and zero-emissions hydrogen to ensure the country continues to position itself as an attractive investment destination without foregoing future revenue streams.
Gabon: Selected Issues
May 31, 2024
Selected Issues
Gabon: 2024 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Gabon
May 31, 2024
In August 2023, Gabon underwent a major political transition after a coup d’état had overthrown a decades-long regime. Despite multiple reform attempts, years of poorly managed oil wealth, weak inclusion, and stagnant incomes fragilized the political and socio-economic environment in the runup to the coup. The transition authorities now face a historic opportunity to pivot towards a more transparent and inclusive model of governance, but overcoming decades of entrenched institutional practice will require sustained reform efforts to achieve a point of no return. Meanwhile, the Fund-supported EFF program veered off-track soon after the completion of the first two reviews in 2022 and will expire soon.
Bangladesh: Technical Assistance Report-Ministry of Finance Macroeconomic Framework Technical Assistance: Scoping Mission Report
May 31, 2024
This technical assistance (TA) report presents the outcomes of the scoping mission of a new TA project aimed at building capacity in macroeconomic forecasting and policy analysis in the Finance Division (FD) of the Bangladesh Ministry of Finance (MoF). The FD has sought Macroeconomic Framework Technical Assistance from ICD and SARTTAC to support them in enhancing their Medium-term Macroeconomic Framework. A scoping mission was held in Dhaka in January 2023 to diagnose the FD’s current forecasting and policy analysis systems and to agree on a multi-year action plan. The project action plan is centered around the customization of the Macroframework Foundations Tool (MFT), which will support the FD in overcoming limitations in their current approach.
Unveiling the Informal Economy: An Augmented Factor Model Approach
May 31, 2024
This paper develops a new approach to estimating the degree of informality in an economy. It combines direct yet infrequent measures of the informal economy in micro data with an augmented factor model that links macro indicators of the informal economy to its causes. We show that the prevailing model used in the literature, the multiple indicators multiple causes model, is a special case of the augmented factor model and depicts an incomplete picture of the informal economy. Using the augmented factor model approach, we show that the dynamics of the informal economy is shaped by the strength of overall economic activity as well as the interplay between the formal and informal economies. Contrary to previous work that typically finds declining informality for most countries, we find that the degree of informality has increased for low-income countries for the past two decades.