Institutional research & analysis

Source: IMF

INSTITUTIONAL

ReportJune 11, 2026

Unlocking Rwanda’s Export Potential: Removing Structural Bottlenecks

Rwanda’s export base remains narrow and concentrated, limiting diversification and contributing to persistent external imbalances. Despite strong growth and substantial public investment, competitiveness challenges—including high logistics costs, limited value addition, and weak integration into global value chains—have constrained export performance. This Selected Issues Paper assesses the structural and macroeconomic factors holding back export expansion and identifies policy priorities to ...

IMF1 min read

Policy PaperJune 5, 2026

Key Trends in Implementing the Fund's Transparency Policy

At the time of the 2005 Review of the Fund’s Transparency Policy, the Executive Board requested regular updates on trends in implementing the transparency policy. This report provides an overview of recent developments in implementation of the policy, reflecting information on documents considered by the Board in 2023 and updating the previous annual report on Key Trends issued in July 2024. Deeper analysis of these trends is undertaken in the context of periodic reviews of the Fund’s Transpa...

IMF1 min read

Working PaperJune 5, 2026

Leveraging Non-traditional Data for Macroeconomic Nowcasting: The Case of Morocco

Making informed policy decisions is contingent upon the availability of reliable and timely data. The use of non-traditional data has been shown to be a powerful tool for enabling policymakers to conduct robust nowcasting—the practice of estimating the current period’s economic indicator(s), ahead of official releases, using a wide range of macroeconomic and high-frequency data. This paper showcases how different types of non-traditional data, such as indices extracted from satellite imagery,...

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Working PaperJune 5, 2026

Peer Pressure: How Relative Debt Drives Emerging Market Sovereign Spreads

This paper shows that sovereign bond spreads are shaped not only by absolute debt levels but also by a country’s relative debt position within its peer group. Using panel fixed effects for over 80 emerging and developing economies over 1993-2024, we find that relative debt—especially benchmarked by income and commodity status—has greater explanatory power for spreads than gross debt alone. A one–standard deviation increase in relative debt raises spreads by roughly 0.2–0.3 standard deviations...

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Working PaperJune 5, 2026

Nowcasting Low-Income Countries Through Global Linkages

Timely assessment of economic activity is crucial for effective policymaking at the national, regional, and global levels. However, many economies still do not publish GDP data at a quarterly basis, creating persistent information gaps. In 2025, 34% of economies publish only annual GDP statistics. This lack of higher-frequency and timely data is particularly restrictive for emerging market and developing economies, where economic volatility and spillover risks are often highest. The problem i...

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Working PaperJune 5, 2026

The Growth Effects of Natural Disasters: Evidence From A Novel Global Dataset Over 1970-2023

We construct standardized climate anomalies from daily observations and carefully calibrate physical thresholds to identify storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and cold snaps across 196 countries over the period 1970–2023. Using a local projections framework, we estimate the contemporaneous and 2-year effects of each disaster type and collectively on real GDP growth. We find that storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves significantly reduce growth on impact (by roughly 0.1–0.2 percentage poin...

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Working PaperJune 5, 2026

Political Fragility: The Economic Impact of Coups d’État

This study uses an entropy balancing model to show that coups d’état can reduce GDP growth by around 2.3 percentage points in the same year. This is a larger effect than some previous estimates, and is found to be persistent over time, reducing cumulative GDP growth by around five percentage points over the following five years. This study goes deeper than previous research into the drivers of that impact, finding that economic sanctions are an an important reason for the observed lower growt...

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Policy PaperJune 5, 2026

The Chair’s Summing Up: Independent Evaluation Office — The IMF and Climate Change

Executive Directors welcomed the report of the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) on the IMF and Climate Change and its well-structured assessment of the Fund’s engagement across surveillance, lending, and capacity development. Most Directors concurred with the report’s positive assessment that the Fund’s work on climate, anchored in members’ macroeconomic and financial frameworks, has provided high value for the membership and the Global Climate Architecture. They noted that the initial pha...

IMF1 min read

Policy PaperJune 5, 2026

Statement by the Managing Director on the Independent Evaluation Office Report on the IMF and Climate Change

I welcome the IEO’s comprehensive evaluation, which finds that the Fund’s work on climate has had high value for our members. The report provides a well-structured assessment of the Fund’s climate-related engagement across surveillance, lending, and capacity development, highlighting how this work has been anchored in members’ macroeconomic and financial frameworks. To follow up on the IEO’s three main recommendations—which I support, with some qualifications—a Management Implementation Plan ...

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Working PaperJune 5, 2026

The Sovereign-Bank Nexus in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies: Trends, Determinants, and Macrofinancial Implications

As public debt in emerging markets (EMs) and low-income countries (LICs) has surged since the COVID-19 pandemic, so has the exposure of domestic banks to their sovereigns—raising concerns of destabilizing feedback loops if fiscal conditions deteriorate. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of this sovereign-bank nexus using a new granular dataset covering over 120 EMs and LICs, combined with IMF Financial Soundness Indicators. We document a marked post-pandemic strengthening of the ne...

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Working PaperJune 5, 2026

Drivers of Germany’s Growth Downturn

Germany’s economy experienced a pronounced recession during 2023–24, with real GDP contracting and growth falling notably behind the rest of the euro area. This paper systematically examines the underlying causes of this downturn using four complementary approaches. We find that about 60 percent of Germany’s growth underperformance was due to lower potential growth while about 40 percent reflected cyclical factors. The downturn was broad-based, with nearly all major expenditure categories—but...

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Working PaperJune 5, 2026

There Will Be Liquidity! But Will There Be Transmission?

This paper examines the impact of voluntary and involuntary excess liquidity on monetary policy effectiveness and inflation in Kazakhstan. Consistent with first-principles predictions, we find that voluntary liquidity held for precautionary motives is (i) negatively related to the opportunity cost of holding liquid assets and to the level of mandatory reserve requirements; (ii) positively related to average liquidity outflows, proxied by transactional demand for cash; and (iii) ambiguously af...

IMF1 min read