Multilateral Consultations are a new tool of multilateral surveillance for the IMF, designed to foster action-oriented debate and policy actions on a problem of systemic or regional importance. The first multilateral consultation focused on facilitating the resolution of global imbalances while...

After narrowing modestly in 2013, the global scale of current account imbalances, and of excess imbalances, held steady in 2014. Over the last several years, while the country composition of imbalances has rotated somewhat, overall there has been little progress on reducing excess imbalances....

After narrowing in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and remaining broadly unchanged in recent years, global imbalances increased moderately in 2015, amid a reconfiguration of current accounts and exchange rates. Shifts in 2015 were driven primarily by the uneven strength of the...

Global current account imbalances were broadly unchanged in 2016, with minor shifts adding to the reconfiguration under way since 2013. The fall in commodity prices, uneven cyclical recoveries in systemic economies, and differences in policy responses contributed to the rotation of imbalances....

The IMF's Second Pilot External Sector Report presents a multilaterally consistent assessment of the largest economies' external sector positions and policies for 2012-2013 H1. The report integrates the analysis from the Fund's bilateral and multilateral surveillance to provide a coherent...

The IMF's third Pilot External Sector Report (ESR) presents a multilaterally consistent assessment of the largest economies' external sector positions and policies for 2013 and early 2014. The report integrates the analysis from the Fund's bilateral and multilateral surveillance to provide a...

This Pilot External Sector Report (ESR) provides a multilaterally consistent analysis of the external positions of major world economies. Following the recommendations of thea2011 Triennial Surveillance Reviewaand the Managing Director'saStatement on Strengthening Surveillance, the focus of the...

The IMF, in cooperation with other concerned organizations, set up a working party to investigate and improve the statistical procedures being used, and to recommend compilation procedures that would make nations' balance of payments statistics more consistent with one another. In addition to...

This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries'' external balance, including the oil and non-oil trade balances, the current account, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975-2004. We explicitly take a global...

This paper examines the relationship between fiscal policy and the current account, drawing on a larger country sample than in previous studies and using panel regressions, vector autoregressions, and an analysis of large fiscal and external adjustments. On average, a strengthening in the fiscal...