Abstract
The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.
Summary of WP/92/103
“Money and Banking Statistics in Former Soviet Union (FSU) Economies” by Robert Di Calogero, K. Wilhelm Nahr, and Richard T. Stillson
The former Soviet financial system played a passive role in administering the credit allocation decisions that were contained in the overall economic plan. To monitor and control monetary and credit flows, the Soviet authorities developed a detailed accounting system (the Gosbank Standard Plan of Accounts) that, with some modifications, can be adapted to the requirements of the Fund’s money and banking statistics (MBS) methodology. The major modification is the introduction of the residency criterion to distinguish domestic from foreign transactions. This paper presents a derivation table, or key, that allows one to construct monetary statistics from the Standard Plan of Accounts.
Historical monetary aggregates compiled from Soviet data would not help determine the behavior of such aggregates during either the period of a command economy or the transition to a market economy. In the command economy, monetary aggregates played only a passive role, whereas in the transition to a market economy financial institutions have changed so rapidly that it is impossible to determine the underlying relationships of monetary aggregates to macroeconomic activity.
When the MBS methodology is applied to the former Soviet republics, problems arise owing to the collapse of their financial institutions. Foremost among these problems are the treatment of ruble currency circulation and the classification of the claims on financial institutions in the former Soviet Union.
Ruble currency circulation is a problem because the ruble is not the liability of a resident financial institution in any of the former republics except the Russian Federation. This problem is addressed through the introduction of a monetary authorities’ account that reflects both the foreign (nonresident) and domestic (resident) characteristics of the ruble in each of the former republics.
Claims on financial institutions in the former Soviet republics should be separately identified in banks’ balance sheets. When claims have been made on defunct institutions, they could be considered either as de facto claims on the republican governments --which are the ultimate guarantors of their citizens’ deposits--or as charges against capital.