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Cover Departmental Papers
Macroprudential Policy Effects: Evidence and Open Questions
Nina Biljanovska
,
Sophia Chen
,
Mr. R. G Gelos
,
Ms. Deniz O Igan
,
Mr. Maria Soledad Martinez Peria
,
Erlend Nier
, and
Mr. Fabian Valencia
The global financial crisis (GFC) underscored the need for additional policy tools to safeguard financial stability and ultimately macroeconomic stability. Systemic financial vulnerabilities had developed under a seemingly tranquil macroeconomic surface of low inflation and small output gaps. This challenged the precrisis view that achieving these traditional policy targets was a sufficient condition for macroeconomic stability. Thus, new tools had to be deployed to target specific financial vulnerabilities and to build buffers to cushion adverse aggregate shocks, while allowing traditional policy levers, including monetary and microprudential policies to focus on their traditional roles. Macroprudential policy measures emerged as the solution to this gap. Some of these measures had been used before the GFC (mostly in emerging markets). But it was only after the crisis that they were more widely adopted, and the toolkit expanded. This spurred a growing body of empirical research on the effects and potential shortfalls of these measures, with a further deepening of this knowledge gaining importance as policymakers confront increased financial stability risks in the post-pandemic world. Recognizing that there still is much to learn, this paper takes stock of our expanding understanding about the effects (and side effects) of macroprudential measures by focusing on these questions: What have we learned about the effects of macroprudential policy in containing the buildup of vulnerabilities? What do we know about the effects on economic activity and resilience? How do policy effects vary with conditions and over time? How important are leakages and circumvention? How do the effects on credit depend on other policies?
Keywords:
macroprudential policy financial stability; policy effect; IMF Library; Macroprudential effect; Macroprudential buffer; Macroprudential Policy database; Macroprudential policy; Macroprudential policy instruments; Credit; Countercyclical capital buffers; Bank credit; Global
Cover FinTech Notes
The Rise and Impact of Fintech in Latin America
Mr. Bas B. Bakker
,
Weicheng Lian
,
Yang Liu
,
Mariusz A. Sumlinski
,
Yuanchen Yang
, and
Dmitry Vasilyev
In the past decade, fintech has shaken up the financial sector in Latin America providing innovations in lending, payments, insurance, and regulation and compliance. This paper examines this development by focusing on both fintech services and regulation. Exploring fintech’s macro-critical impact using country- and bank-level data, we find that booming financial technologies in Latin America have helped boost competition in the banking sector and inclusion. Additionally, we demonstrate that fintech firms in Latin America experienced robust growth even during the pandemic supported by external funding. Finally, we discuss how regulators are addressing the risks associated with financial technologies and how they are leveraging fintech tools in their supervisory activities.
Keywords:
Fintech; financial inclusion; financial development; financial risks; financial regulation; Latin America
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Botswana: Technical Assistance Report-National Accounts Statistics Mission
International Monetary Fund. Statistics Dept.
A technical assistance (TA) mission was conducted during October 2022 to assist Statistics Botswana (SB) in the development of the strategic plan for the next rebase of the national accounts statistics. The SB will be focusing on the rebase over the coming years and has no plans to expand on what they currently produce unless adequate resources are obtained. The mission reviewed and suggested updates to the outline of the rebase with objectives and key tasks and to the implementation strategy. The timeline for the rebasing exercise was reviewed and agreed. The rebase will officially commence in April 2023 and is likely to take four to five years to complete, i.e., finish in 2028/29. The next base year will be 2024 given the timings of when key surveys will be undertaken, namely the Agriculture Census (2024/25), the Botswana Multi Topic Household Survey (BMTHS) (2023/24) and the Census of Economic Establishments (CEE) 2024. The questionnaires used in the last rebase were reviewed with the aim of improving the response rate and minimizing costs. The mission also provided some other examples of questionnaires which should provide some guidance.
Keywords:
national accounts; rebase; base year
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Republic of Tajikistan: 2022 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for the Republic of Tajikistan
International Monetary Fund. Middle East and Central Asia Dept.
Strong growth continued in 2022 with minimal disruption from the war in Ukraine, while strong financial inflows supported domestic demand and liquidity. Although negative spillovers from the war have not materialized, it remains unclear to what extent Tajikistan will continue to be relatively unaffected by weaker economic activity in Russia.
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Peru: 2023 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Peru
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
Against the background of a strong economic performance over the last quarter of a century, Peru has been hit by multiple shocks in the last several years. Adequate policies and very strong policy frameworks have made the economy resilient. Following a steep decline in 2020 at the outset of the pandemic and a rapid recovery in 2021, growth slowed significantly in 2022 as the policy stimulus was withdrawn and external and financial conditions deteriorated. Recent political developments suggest that the new government needs to work across the political spectrum to create broader political consensus, reduce uncertainty, ease social tensions, and boost growth.
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Panama: 2022 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Panama
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
Panama was hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic, but the recovery has been strong. GDP expanded by 15.3 percent in 2021 and a projected 9 percent in 2022. Inflation is low compared with other countries, in part the result of temporary subsidies on fuel and food. The fiscal deficit declined from 10½ percent of GDP in 2020 to 4 percent of GDP in 2022 and central government gross debt is estimated at 60 percent of GDP at end-2022. Banks are, on average, well capitalized and liquid. As insurance against external shocks, the IMF Executive Board approved a two-year Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL) arrangement for 500 percent of quota, equivalent to US$2.7 billion (SDR 1.884 billion), on January 19, 2021.
Cover IMF Working Papers
Currency Usage for Cross Border Payments
Hector Perez-Saiz
,
Ms. Longmei Zhang
, and
Roshan Iyer
While the global usage of currencies other than the U.S. dollar and the euro for cross-border payments remains limited, rapid technological (e.g. digital money) or geopolitical changes could accelerate a regime shift into a multipolar or more fragmented international monetary system. Using the rich Swift database of cross-border payments, we empirically estimate the importance of legal tender status, geopolitical distance, and other variables vis-à-vis the large inertia effects for currency usage, and perform several forecasting simulations to better understand the role of these variables in shaping the future payments landscape. While our results suggest a substantially more fragmented international monetary system would be unlikely in the short and medium term, the impact of new technologies remains highly uncertain, and much more rapid geopolitical developments than expected could accelerate the transformation of the international monetary system towards multipolarity.
Keywords:
Cross border payments; Swift; currency dominance; legal tender; international monetary system (IMS)
Cover IMF Working Papers
Fragmentation in Global Trade: Accounting for Commodities
Marijn A. Bolhuis
,
Mr. Jiaqian Chen
, and
Benjamin R Kett
We construct a new database which covers production and trade in 136 primary commodities and 24 manufacturing and service sectors for 145 countries. Using this new more granular data, we estimate spillover effects from plausible trade fragmentation scenarios in a new multi-country, multi-sector, general-equilibrium model that accounts for unique demand and supply characteristics of commodities. The results show fragmentation-induced output losses can be sizable, especially for Low-Income-Countries, although the magnitudes vary according to the particular scenarios and modelling assumptions. Our work demonstrates that not accounting for granular commodity production and trade linkages leads to underestimation of the output losses associated with trade fragmentation.
Keywords:
Commodities; international trade; sanctions; spillovers; fragmentation
Cover IMF Working Papers
European Housing Markets at a Turning Point – Risks, Household and Bank Vulnerabilities, and Policy Options
Ms. Laura Valderrama
,
Patrik Gorse
,
Ms. Marina Marinkov
, and
Petia Topalova
European housing markets are at a turning point as the cost-of-living crisis has eroded real incomes and the surge in interest rates has made borrowers more vulnerable to financial distress. This paper aims to (i) shed light on the risks in European housing markets, (ii) quantify household vulnerabilties, (iii) assess banking sector implications and (iv) examine policies’ effectiveness using simulations based on microdata from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) and EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC). Under the baseline IMF macroeconomic forecast, the share of households that could struggle to meet basic expenses could rise by 10 pps reaching a third of all households by end 2023. Under an adverse scenario, 45 percent of households could be financially stretched, representing over 40 percent of mortgage debt and 45 percent of consumer debt. The impact on the banking sector seems contained under the baseline forecast, though there are pockets of vulnerability. A 20 percent house price correction could deplete CET1 capital by 100-300 basis points. Fiscal measures, such as subsidies to the bottom income tercile, could save 7 percent of households from financial distress at an estimated cost of 0.8 percent of GDP.
Keywords:
Housing markets; overvaluation; affordability; household vulnerability; tenure status; income distribution; consumption; financial stability; targeted support; macroprudential policy.
Cover IMF Working Papers
Policy Responses to High Energy and Food Prices
David Amaglobeli
,
Mengfei Gu
,
Emine Hanedar
,
Mr. Gee Hee Hong
, and
Celine Thevenot
The surge in energy and food prices, which was amplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has prompted a flurry of policy responses by countries during 2022. The aim of these policy responses was to mitigate social and economic impact of higher prices. In this paper we document announcements of policy measures based on the Database of Energy and Food Price Actions (DEFPA), which was developed based on two rounds of survey responses of IMF country teams conducted in March/April and June/July of 2022. The paper also provides discussion on policy trade-offs when considering appropriate policy responses both for countries with strong and weak social safety nets. Key policy message is that providing targeted support to households in the form of cash transfers is the most cost-effective way of alleviating the burden on vulnerable households and have to be preferred over broad-based mechanisms that prevent international prices to pass through to domestic consumers.
Keywords:
Energy prices; food Prices; cost of living; social policy