You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This report provides an update on the status of implementation of the HIPC Initiative and the MDRI over the past year. Given that most HIPCs have reached the completion point, in November 2011, the IMF and IDA Boards2 endorsed staff’s proposal to further streamline reporting of progress under the HIPC Initiative and MDRI. It was agreed that the annual HIPC Initiative/MDRI status of implementation report will be discontinued, while the core information—on debt service and poverty reducing expenditure, the cost of debt relief, creditor participation rates, and litigation against HIPCs—should continue to be made available and updated regularly on the IMF and World Bank websites.
Contains biographies of Senators, members of Congress, and the Judiciary. Also includes committee assignments, maps of Congressional districts, a directory of officials of executive agencies, addresses, telephone and fax numbers, web addresses, and other information.
New Zealand's reforms of economic policy and public sector management systems have attracted international attention. Beginning in 1984, the country adopted a comprehensive and vigorous program of macroeconomic adjustment that involved redefining the state's role in the economy and social policy. This paper provides an overview of the central frameworks of government management in New Zealand, with particular emphasis on financial management.
The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’s 2007 Article IV Consultation reports on the macroeconomic imbalances and on maintaining medium-term macroeconomic stability while fostering growth potential. Although agriculture continues to be the mainstay of the economy, the expansion has been broad-based, with manufacturing, construction, and services making significant contributions. Expansion of domestic credit has continued to be brisk, reflecting a pickup in private sector economic activity and increasingly negative real interest rates. A critical challenge for Ethiopia is to strike a judicious balance between demand-dampening measures and growth-enhancing structural reforms.
This review of the Flexible Credit Line (FCL), the Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL), and the Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI) focuses on four key issues: (i) the demand for the FCL and PLL in the context of the broader role of the Fund’s lending (including precautionary) instruments in the global financial safety net (GFSN); (ii) the qualification/conditionality framework for the FCL and the PLL; (iii) concerns about repeated usage of FCL arrangements by the same members and consideration of ways to further improve the transparency in the discussion of access/exit in the underlying staff documents; and (iv) the lack of demand for the RFI.
This review examines the experience with the policy on debt limits in Fund-supported programs across the membership and proposes possible reforms to strengthen the policy. The policy was last reformed in 2009 with a view to adapting it to the changing circumstances in low-income countries (LICs). Given its primary focus on LICs, the reform left the policy applying to the rest of the membership broadly unchanged. The Fund’s debt limits policy has been in place since the 1960s. From the policy’s inception, concessional flows have been excluded from debt limits under the presumption that such financing was critical for LICs and posed only limited risks to debt sustainability. Over time, the exclusion of concessional flows has led to a bifurcation in the policy, with one branch focusing on members to whom concessional financing is normally available, and the other on those to whom it is not—a distinction which in practical terms has involved differentiating between LICs and non-LICs.
his paper reviews the recent application of the Fund’s policies and practices on sovereign debt restructuring. Specifically, the paper: • recaps in a holistic manner the various policies and practices that underpin the Fund's legal and policy framework for sovereign debt restructuring, including on debt sustainability, market access, financing assurances, arrears, private sector involvement (PSI), official sector involvement (OSI), and the use of legal instruments; • reviews how this framework has been applied in the context of Fund-supported programs and highlights the issues that have emerged in light of recent experience with debt restructuring; and • describes recent initiatives ...
In February 2012, the Executive Board adopted new procedures to address excessive delays in the completion of Article IV consultations. These consisted of three formal steps to be applied to all members with serious delays, regardless of the reason for delay, recognizing that the obligation to consult with the Fund under Article IV applies uniformly to all members. These steps are: (i) sending a letter from the Managing Director where an Article IV consultation is delayed for more than 12 months from the expected deadline for its conclusion; (ii) publishing a list of members with Article IV consultations delayed for over 18 months; and (iii) holding an informal session to brief Executive Dir...