In my talk today, I will review some of the most important aspects of the IMF’s stance on fiscal policy. The IMF typically adopts a strong national accounting framework as the basis for designing its programs. This framework produces a series of accounting relationships that are basically identities. The really interesting economic issues are concerned with the movements through time of accounting relationships that are the main macroeconomic variables in dynamic models. However, the IMF starts with an accounting framework, and this focus explains why IMF mission members ask so many tedious questions—to get the statistics right. This data framework, which is accepted by both country authorities and mission teams, is based on the principal monetary and fiscal figures.
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