This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks’ mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

Climate change poses three specific but interrelated policy challenges: climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation (which includes building up resilience) and managing transition risks. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a multilateral institution with global reach and...

The last decade has been characterised by the pronounced volatility of capital flows. While cross-border capital flows can have many benefits for both advanced and emerging market economies, they may also carry risks, which require appropriate policy responses. Disentangling the push from the...

Conditionality is at the very heart of IMF lending and has been the subject of intense debates ever since the Fund’s inception. Its success is of crucial importance not only for countries’ chances of achieving the goals of IMF lending programmes, but also for the credibility of the Fund as a...

In this report, three methodological approaches are applied to assess the size of the International Monetary Fund: benchmarking Fund resources against a number of relevant global economic and financial indicators; an extrapolation of past and current IMF programme characteristics; and a shock...

Since the global financial crisis, the Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN), traditionally consisting mainly of countries' own foreign exchange reserves with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acting as a backstop, has expanded significantly with the continued accumulation of reserves, the...

There is a perception that IMF programmes are not catalytic and instead associated with large capital outflows, higher refinancing costs for sovereigns and adverse movements in stock markets. This has led to concerns that an expectation of adverse effects of IMF programmes may deter countries...