Imf Surveillance In Europe

Cross-border financial integration has increased the need to make suitable multilateral arrangements for global financial cooperation and oversight - these include more intense and more effective financial sector surveillance by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The financial sector has a crucial role to play in addressing today's global health emergency, and it is important that it remains sufficiently resilient to facilitate the prompt return to more orderly economic conditions worldwide.

Europe’s banking system is weighed down by high levels of non-performing loans (NPLs), which are holding down credit growth and economic activity. This discussion note uses a new survey of European country authorities and banks to examine the structural obstacles that discourage banks from addressing their problem loans. A three pillared strategy is advocated to remedy the situation, comprising: (i) tightened supervisory policies, (ii) insolvency reforms, and (iii) the development of distressed debt markets.

Cross-border financial integration has increased the need to make suitable multilateral arrangements for global financial cooperation and oversight - these include more intense and more effective financial sector surveillance by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The financial sector has a crucial role to play in addressing today's global health emergency, and it is important that it remains sufficiently resilient to facilitate the prompt return to more orderly economic conditions worldwide.

The latest book by journalist and author Paul Blustein to go behind the scenes at the highest levels of global economic policy making, Laid Low chronicles the International Monetary Fund’s role in the euro-zone crisis. Based on interviews with a wide range of participants and scrutiny of thousands of documents, the book tells how the IMF joined in bailouts that all too often piled debt atop debt and imposed excessively harsh conditions on crisis-stricken countries. As the author shows, IMF officials had grave misgivings about a number of these rescues, but went along at the insistence of powerful European policy makers — to the detriment of the Fund’s credibility, with disheartening implications for the management of future crises. The narrative ends with a tale of the clash between Greece’s radical Syriza government and the country’s creditor institutions that reached a dramatic climax in the summer of 2015.

External Study prepared by Jean Pisani-Ferry, André Sapir, and Guntram B. Wolff: This report provides an independent evaluation of recent IMF surveillance in the euro area (EA). It focuses on the euro area as a whole and on four countries severely hit by the recent economic and financial crisis, namely Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,5, London School of Economics (European Institute), course: MPhil/PhD Programme, language: English, abstract: This paper assesses the dynamics of EU-IMF interaction over the course of European monetary unification. Thereby, it adds to a growing body of literature on the external dimension of EU policy-making. To illustrate how EU-IMF relations have changed over the last 20 years, the paper first finds that member states remain the primary, but not the only actors. Second, it provides a descriptive account of EU-IMF relations in the observed period, both in its institutional and functional dimension. Its main finding is that institutional and functional interaction have not developed in parallel, i.e. that the increase in day-to-day engagement between the IMF and the EU through the activities of surveillance, lending and technical assistance, in particular as a result of the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone, has not corresponded to formalization of EU-Fund relations.

A recovery is underway, but the economic fallout from the global pandemic could be with us for years to come. With the crisis exacerbating prepandemic vulnerabilities, country prospects are diverging. Nearly half of emerging market and developing economies and some middle-income countries are now at risk of falling further behind, undoing much of the progress made toward achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Fund surveillance needs to evolve to face the economic and financial challenges that will shape the global landscape for years to come. This paper first takes stock of the current economic and financial landscape. To better serve the membership in this context, Fund surveillance should be prioritized around four key priorities: (i) confronting risks and uncertainties: policymakers will need to actively manage the risks of a highly uncertain outlook; (ii) preempting and mitigating adverse spillovers: shifting patterns of global economic integration will bring about new channels for contagion and policy spillovers; (iii) fostering economic sustainability: a broader understanding of sustainability to better account for the impact of economic and non-economic developments on stability; and (iv) unified policy advice: better accounting for the trade-offs and synergies among different policy combinations in the face of limited policy space and overlapping priorities, tailored to country-specific circumstances. These priorities should further enhance the traction of Fund surveillance.

This departmental paper investigates how countries in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) can improve fiscal transparency, thereby raising government efficiency and reducing corruption vulnerabilities.