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Health and Fitness

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Cover Policy Papers
Thirteenth Periodic Monitoring Report on The Status of Management Implementation Plans in Response to Board-Endorsed IEO Recommendations
International Monetary Fund. Office of Internal Audit
Overall, progress has been made since the Twelfth PMR on actions in response to eight IEO evaluations, with the pace of implementation being faster on actions October 31, 2023 THIRTEENTH PERIODIC MONITORING REPORT 2 INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND contained in the MIP in Response to the Executive Board-Endorsed Categorization of Open Actions in Management Implementation Plans. It is also worth mentioning that many open actions depend on the implementation of some important reviews/key steps that are expected to be completed in or soon after December 2023, such as the Capacity Development (CD) Strategy Review, the issuance of a new CD Guidance Note, an update of the Small Developing States Staff Guidance Note (SDS-SGN), the Operational Guidance Note (OGN) on Program Design and Conditionality, and a Board paper on Bank-Fund collaboration.
Keywords:
IEO evaluation; transparency policy; IEO recommendation; strategy review; Thirteenth PMR; Institutional View on capital flows; Capital flows; COVID-19; Capital account; Global; East Asia; Sub-Saharan Africa; Caribbean; Pacific Islands
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Maldives: 2021 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Maldives
International Monetary Fund. Asia and Pacific Dept
The Maldives is recovering after the historical 2020 fall in tourism, aided by a rapid COVID-19 vaccination program rollout. While the prompt and comprehensive policy approach in early 2020 was effective, a more prolonged pandemic and ambitious infrastructure projects are further weakening large pre-pandemic fiscal and external vulnerabilities.
Keywords:
positivity rate; program rollout; MMA authorities; staff projection; staff supplement; Maldivian authorities; MMA advance; COVID-19; Capital spending; South Asia; Global; Asia and Pacific
Cover IMF Working Papers
The Pass-through of Wages to Consumer Prices in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Sectoral Data in the U.S.
Moya Chin and Ms. Li Lin
We study the pass-through of labor costs to prices using a novel data-set that links industry-level wages to sectoral consumer prices through input-output tables. Pass-through increased during the COVID-19 pandemic recovery, temporarily in goods and persistently in services. Our analysis suggests that the elevated pass-through contributed at least 0.8 percentage points to goods inflation in 2021 and 0.7 percentage points and 0.5 percentage points to services inflation in 2021 and 2022, respectively. We find that the increase in pass-through reflects elevated demand in goods sectors and firms' difficulty in absorbing high wage growth in services sectors. The analysis suggests it will take a reduction in wage growth to bring PCE inflation back to target. Fiscal and monetary policies that help to re-balance the labor markets can facilitate this process.
Keywords:
inflation dynamics; PCE inflation; elevated pass-through; services inflation; goods sector; Wages; COVID-19; Inflation; Services sector; Import prices; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
A Comprehensive Macroeconomic Uncertainty Measure for the Euro Area and its Implications to COVID-19
Mariarosaria Comunale and Anh D. M. Nguyen
This paper develops a new data-driven metric to capture MacroEconomic Uncertainty (MEU) in the euro area. The measure is constructed as the conditional volatility of the unforecastable components of a large set of time series, accounting for the monetary union as well as cross-country heterogeneity. MEU exhibits the largest spike at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak and is noticeably different from other more financial-oriented and policy-driven uncertainty measures. It also reveals a significant increase in inflation uncertainty in 2021-2022. Our BVAR-based analysis shows that an unexpected increase in the MEU has a negative and persistent impact on euro area's industrial production, accounting for 80 percent of its reduction during the first wave of COVID-19, therefore supporting the interpretation of COVID-19 shock as a macroeconomic uncertainty shock. Public debt increases in response to this uncertainty shock. Finally, an increase in MEU negatively affects Emerging Europe countries, contributing the most to the decline in their economic activity during this COVID-19 period.
Keywords:
macroeconomic uncertainty; euro area; Bayesian VARs; COVID-19; IMF working paper No. 2023/229; macroeconomic uncertainty shock; increase in MEU; uncertainty shock; meu index; Industrial production; Global financial crisis of 2008-2009; Global; Europe
Cover Policy Papers
Implementation Plan in Response to The Executive Board-Endorsed Recommendations From The IEO Evaluation on The IMF’s Pandemic Response
International Monetary Fund. Strategy, Policy, & Review Department
The Management Implementation Plan (MIP) proposes actions in response to the Board-endorsed recommendations provided by the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO)’s report on the IMF’s early response to the COVID pandemic. The two IEO recommendations aim for the Fund to (i) Develop special policies and procedures that could be quickly activated to address particular needs and circumstances of global crises and (ii) Take steps to reinforce the Fund’s institutional preparedness to deal with global crises and other large shocks. The MIP highlights how existing workstreams will be used to address part of the recommendations, specifically: (i) Drawing the lessons from the use of precautionary lending instruments during the pandemic and using them in the ongoing review of these facilities; (ii) Drawing the lessons from the implementation of governance safeguards in the context of covid-related emergency financing and respond to the actions identified in the final stocktaking; and (iii) Reviewing financial implications of covid-related lending on Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) resources in the regular updates on PRGT financing and resources. The MIP also defines new actions that aim to enhance the Fund’s preparedness to face future crises and are slated to be implemented by the end of FY25. These consists in: (i) Developing a crisis playbook, which will further codify Management’s commitment to an early participatory consultation with the Board in the event of a global crisis and inform the engagement with the Board on the broad strategy and institutional priorities for responding to the crisis; (ii) Enhancing the process of staff reallocation during a crisis through expanding the staff Talent Inventory to include skills and experience relevant in crises and examining HRD’s coordinating role in staff reallocation, as well as reviewing how recruitment processes could be made more agile in a crisis; (iii) Developing a strategy for surge capacity of the Crisis Management Team; (iv) Reviewing the experience of pandemic-related lending to low-income countries to consider the adequacy of access norms and the possible need for enhancements of the low-income lending toolkit against the long-term financial sustainability of the PRGT; and (v) Exploring ways to further strengthen the coordination with partners, especially the World Bank.
Keywords:
Management Implementation plan; COVID-19; pandemic response; IEO evaluation; lending; IEO recommendation; transparency policy; staff reallocation; implementation plan; Crisis management; Crisis prevention; Emergency assistance; Budget planning and preparation; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Monitoring Demand and Supply in Asia: An Industry Level Approach
Chris Redl
This paper provides a decomposition of GDP and its deflator into demand and supply driven components for 12 Asian countries, the US and Europe, following the forecast error-based methodology of Shapiro (2022). We extend that methodology by (1) considering a wide range of statistical forecasting models, using the optimal model for each country and (2) provide a measure idiosyncratic demand and supply movements. The latter provides, for example, a distinction between aggregate demand driven inflation and, inflation driven by large shocks in only a small number of sectors. We find that lockdowns in 2020 are explained by a mix of demand and supply shocks in Asia, but that idiosyncratic demand shocks played a significant role in some countries. Supply factors played an important role in the post-COVID recovery, primarily in 2021, with demand factors becoming more important in 2022. The mix of shocks during the sharp increase in inflation in 2021-22 differs by country, with large and advanced economies generally experiencing more supply shocks (China, Australia, Korea), while emerging markets saw significant demand pressures pushing up prices (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand). We illustrate the usefulness of the industry level shocks in two applications. Firstly, we consider whether industry supply shocks have created demand-like movements in aggregate prices and quantities, so-called Keynesian supply shocks. We find evidence for this mechanism in a minority of countries in our Asia sample, as well for Europe and the USA, but that these results are driven by the COVID-19 event. Secondly, we use the granularity of the industry shocks to construct country-level GDP shocks, driven by idiosyncratic movements at the industry level, to study cross country growth spillovers for the three large economic units in our sample: China, Europe and the US.
Keywords:
Inflation; Demand; Supply; Machine Learning; Spillovers; inflation decomposition; demand and supply shock; GDP shock; demand and supply movement; growth spillover; Supply shocks; Deflation; COVID-19; Asia and Pacific; Europe; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
New Evidence on Spillovers Between Crypto Assets and Financial Markets
Roshan Iyer and Adina Popescu
We analyze returns and volatility spillovers among a representative set of crypto and financial assets. The magnitude of spillovers increases during periods of heightened turbulence due to negative economic-financial news, crypto market events, or exogenous shocks. There is evidence of increasing spillovers over time, with a peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, implying growing interdependence. Crypto assets predominantly transmit spillovers to financial markets, though reversals occur during periods of financial stress. The increased correlation during risk-off episodes suggests that crypto assets could serve as important conduits for financial market shocks, generating financial stability risks.
Keywords:
Cryptocurrencies; Crypto assets; Bitcoin; Spillovers; Return and Volatility Connectedness; crypto market event; magnitude of spillover; volatility connectedness; crypto market; volatility spillover; Stock markets; Securities markets; COVID-19; Global
Cover Policy Papers
Key Trends in Implementing The Fund’s Transparency Policy
International Monetary Fund. Strategy, Policy, & Review Department
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, reflecting information on documents considered by the Board in 2021 and updating the previous annual report on Key Trends. Deeper analysis of these trends is undertaken in the context of periodic reviews of the Fund’s Transparency Policy.
Keywords:
transparency Policy; country policy intention document; deletion request; publication rate; country document; Emerging and frontier financial markets; Monetary unions; COVID-19; Anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT); Financial Sector Assessment Program; Middle East and Central Asia; Caribbean; Sub-Saharan Africa; Europe; Asia and Pacific
Cover IMF Working Papers
Dining and Wining During the Pandemic? A Quasi-Experiment on Tax Cuts and Consumer Spending in Lithuania
Mr. Serhan Cevik
Could temporary tax cuts stimulate consumer spending? Sector-specific measures to the COVID-19 pandemic provides a quasi-experimental variation in consumption patterns to infer a causal effect of tax policy changes. Using a novel dataset of daily debit and credit card transactions, this paper investigates the effectiveness of Lithuania’s decision to cut the standard value-added tax (VAT) rate from 21 percent to 9 percent on restaurants and catering services during the pandemic in a difference-in-differences regression framework. I obtain robust evidence that the VAT reduction has had no statistically significant impact on consumer spending on restaurants and catering services, while other policy interventions such as mobility restrictions and vaccination have more pronounced effects. These results have important policy implications in terms of the expected stimulative effect of sector-specific VAT reductions and the effective design of fiscal policy interventions to counter the impact of pandemics during which mobility is highly constrained.
Keywords:
Tax policy; value-added tax; consumer spending; pandemic; difference-in-differences; Lithuania; VAT reduction; credit card transactions; consumer spending in Lithuania; novel dataset; consumer spending category; COVID-19; Consumer credit; Consumption; Europe; Baltics
Cover IMF Working Papers
Reported Social Unrest Index: August 2023 Update
Mr. Philip Barrett and Euihyun Bae
This paper is the second update of the Reported Social Unrest Index (Barrett et al. 2022), outlining developments in global social unrest since March 2022. It shows that the fraction of countries experiencing major social unrest events has been stable. Reasons for social unrest can be broadly categorized as stemming from sdebate over constitutional issues, protests connected to specific policies, and other generalized disorder.
Keywords:
attempts to proxy; fraction of country; copyright page; update of the Reported Social Unrest Index; IMF surveillance; Pension spending; Machine learning; Pension reform; Stock markets; COVID-19; Global