Asia and Pacific > Maldives

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International Monetary Fund. Asia and Pacific Dept
This 2001 Article IV Consultation with Maldives highlights that the economic challenges faced by Maldives are strongly influenced by geography and environment. The government’s overarching development strategy consists of creating new growth centers in the north and the south of the country and massive land reclamation in the vicinity of Male. Notwithstanding a slowdown in growth in 2000, Maldives’ economy has prospered with the rapid expansion of tourism and the modernization of the fisheries. At the conclusion of the last Article IV consultation on November 9, 2000, Executive Directors praised Maldives’ overall performance, however, warned of emerging imbalances. Fiscal slippage, compounded by adverse external developments, has been the main cause of recent imbalances in the Maldivian economy, manifested in rapid monetary expansion and sustained pressure on the exchange rate. The report shows that monetary developments have been dominated by central bank financing of fiscal deficits and excess demand for foreign exchange. The IMF staff team concluded that an adjustment of the exchange rate was not warranted until other options had been explored more fully.
International Monetary Fund
The review of PRGT eligibility continues to be guided by the principles of maintaining a transparent, rules-based, and parsimonious framework—ensuring uniformity of treatment across members in similar situations while taking appropriate account of country-specific circumstances. The graduation policy seeks to maintain broad alignment with the World Bank’s IDA graduation practices, while also remaining consistent with the principle of ensuring the self-sustainability of the PRGT’s lending capacity over time. The paper concludes that the existing framework remains broadly appropriate, but could be enhanced in a few areas, including: Making use of additional data sources, namely the IMF BEL database, in assessing that a country has durable and substantial market access, supplementing the current reliance on the World Bank’s IDS database that is produced with a significant lag; Sharpening the specification of circumstances under which the presence of serious short-term vulnerabilities would justify non-graduation of a country that meets the income graduation criterion. This would entail limiting the application of the serious short-term vulnerabilities criterion for countries that exceed the applicable income graduation threshold by 50 percent or more.
Mr. Alexander Massara
and
André Mialou
This paper leverages the IMF’s Financial Access Survey (FAS) database to construct a new composite index of financial inclusion. The topic of financial inclusion has gathered significant attention in recent years. Various initiatives have been undertaken by central banks both in advanced and developing countries to promote financial inclusion. The issue has also attracted increasing interest from the international community with the G-20, IMF, and World Bank Group assuming an active role in developing and collecting financial inclusion data and promoting best practices to improve financial inclusion. There is general recognition among policy makers that financial inclusion plays a significant role in sustaining employment, economic growth, and financial stability. Nonetheless, the issue of its robust measurement is still outstanding. The new composite index uses factor analysis to derive a weighting methodology whose absence has been the most persistent of the criticisms of previous indices. Countries are then ranked based on the new composite index, providing an additional analytical tool which could be used for surveillance and policy purposes on a regular basis.
International Monetary Fund. External Relations Dept.
De Rato on global imbalances; Committee to study IMF finances; IMF management change; Country briefs: Maldives, Israel; Emerging soverign debt markets; Euro area imbalances; Preference erosion; Import protection; Effects of IMF program; ECOSOC meeting.
International Monetary Fund. Secretary's Department

Abstract

The speeches made by officials attending the IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings are published in this volume, along with the press communiqués issued by the International Monetary and Financial Committee and the Development Committee at the conclusion of the meetings.