Title Page
IEO Independent Evaluation Office
of the International Monetary Fund
2001 ANNUAL REPORT
About the IEO
Established in 2001, the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) conducts independent and objective evaluations of the IMF’s policies, activities, and products. In accordance with its terms of reference, it pursues three interrelated objectives:
▸ To support the Executive Board’s institutional governance and oversight responsibilities, thus contributing to accountability.
▸ To enhance the learning culture within the Fund by increasing the ability to draw lessons from experience.
▸ To strengthen the Fund’s external credibility by enhancing transparency and improving understanding of the work of the IMF.
Independence is the fundamental anchor of the IEO’s work. It is completely independent from the IMF’s management team and staff, and operates at “arm’s length from the Executive Board.” Its budget is separate from the Fund’s (it accounts for about 0.5 percent of the institution’s total budget), but subject to the same control procedures. The IEO is entitled to access any internal information and documents with very limited exceptions. The offce’s work is evaluated periodically by external experts.
For further information on the IEO and its ongoing and completed evaluations, please see our website IEO.IMF.org or contact the IEO at +(1) 202.623.9997 or at IEO@IMF.org.
ISBN: 978-1-51359-480-4
Contents
MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR
1. OVERVIEW OF RECENT ACTIVITIES
Growth and Adjustment in IMF-Supported Programs
IMF Advice on Capital Flows
IMF Collaboration with the World Bank on Macro-Structural Issues
Outreach and Communication
Budget and Staffing
2. FOLLOW-UP ON IEO EVALUATIONS
3. IEO WORK PROGRAM
ADMINISTRATIVE BUDGET
REFERENCES
Message from the Director
It’s now been well over a year since the IEO like the rest of the IMF shifted to working from home in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The urgent need of supporting the membership in the grips of the health and economic crises created by the pandemic led to a reprioritization of IMF work to focus squarely on the emergency needs facing the institution. Nevertheless, the important part played by independent evaluation at the Fund was quickly recognized, spurring committed efforts to sustain the IEO’s evaluation work in the new environment.
Although working remotely has certainly complicated the task of ensuring effective team work, it has also brought new opportunities as it made more evident the benefits of virtual communications, including in providing better ways to manage work and family life and to go beyond physical constraints to link with our stakeholders world-wide. We now look forward to what will hopefully be a successful transition to a new hybrid working model at the Fund in the months ahead. We will aim to regain the benefits of closer and more spontaneous contact with colleagues in our office and within the Fund more broadly, but at the same time continue to take advantage of more flexible working arrangements and to stay in closer touch with all those interested in what we are doing around the world.
Since our last annual report, two major evaluations have been discussed at the Board: on IMF advice on capital flows and on collaboration with the World Bank on macrostructural issues. Both evaluations drew strong interest as being highly relevant to challenges now facing the Fund. The pandemic has brought renewed attention to the difficulties faced by many countries in dealing with volatile capital flows and the rapidly increasing work by both Fund and Bank on climate issues has underlined the need for the two institutions to find ways to work together more effectively.
Our most recent evaluation on growth and adjustment in IMF-supported programs has been circulated to the Board for discussion at the end of August. While the experience it evaluates is pre-COVID, the issues that it looks at are even more important post-COVID. In short, how effective is the Fund in helping countries support their economies during adjustment and in fostering stronger medium-term growth prospects, while achieving needed external adjustment to solve their balance of payments problems? The study finds no clear evidence that the Fund imposes an excessive anti-austerity bias as a condition for its program financing. At the same time, however, the evaluation concludes that the Fund could pay more consistent and effective attention to supporting growth outcomes in designing and monitoring programs.
Welcome progress has been made in following up on recent evaluations, and some delays in the follow-up process more broadly should have been made up by the end of the year. The implementation plan for the capital flows evaluation was approved by the Board in February and is now well under way. The implementation plan for the Bank-Fund collaboration evaluation has taken a little longer given the need to reach agreement on some actions with the Bank but should be finalized shortly. Good progress has already been made on following up on the 2019 evaluations on IMF financial surveillance and IMF advice on unconventional monetary policies. I look forward to completion of the delayed Eleventh Periodic Monitoring Report which will provide a more comprehensive look at the record in following through with past implementation plans. I also look forward to the reformulation of a number of incomplete past actions by the end of this year, in line with the Board approved triage framework for long-standing open actions.
Looking forward, we have three evaluations in the pipeline, each of which should bring valuable perspectives on the IMF’s early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most advanced is an evaluation of the IMF’s relations with its small developing state (SDS) members, many of which have been particularly hard hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic. Next in the pipeline is an evaluation of the IMF’s capacity development work, which includes attention to the particular challenges from providing CD in a travel constrained environment and from increasing pressures on budgetary resources. Finally, we have just launched an evaluation of the IMF’s emergency response to the pandemic, focused particularly on the challenges of providing emergency financing at very short notice to an unprecedented number of countries. The evaluation is being coordinated closely with counterparts in the World Bank as well as in other MDBs. This work is intended to be followed in due course by a second more holistic evaluation of broader aspects of the pandemic response with a longer time perspective.
Finally, we are planning a twentieth anniversary conference on the IEO’s work since its founding in 2001 for late this year. This will be a successor to a similar conference at the IEO’s ten-year anniversary and will provide the opportunity to reflect on the experience of the IEO’s second decade and consider the challenges ahead. I hope that many of the readers of this Annual Report will have the opportunity to participate in this event.
CHARLES COLLYNS
Director, Independent Evaluation Office
