Implementation Plan In Response To The Executive Board Endorsed Recommendations From The Ieo Evaluation Of The Imfs Financial Surveillance

The actions in this Management Implementation Plan aim at: • Strengthening financial and macrofinancial analysis in Article IV consultations • Refocusing FSAP country selection and scope • Increasing traction of multilateral surveillance • Enhancing the IMF’s macrofinancial analysis toolkit • Building financial skills and expertise at the Fund

"This management implementation plan (MIP) proposes actions to advance the Board-endorsed recommendations of the IEO evaluation “The IMF and Fragile States.” The actions outlined below would have resource implications. While some can be covered by reallocating resources or are already in the Work Program, others may require temporary funding; a review of staffing allocations to countries in fragile and conflict situations (FCS) might call for new permanent resources. The actions are broad in scope and self-reinforcing in effect if adopted as a package. They include: - Message of high-level commitment: Reflecting the actions of this MIP, a Management statement underscoring a strengthened institutional commitment to support FCS accompanies the MIP for Executive Board and IMFC endorsement. - An effective institutional mechanism: A high-level interdepartmental FCS Committee that reports to and seeks guidance in a formal meeting with management twice a year, will be established. The Committee will be tasked to analyze internal and external coordination issues in FCS and propose new ways tostrengthen engagement. An interdepartmental Technical Taskforce will support the Committee and report on progress in implementing this MIP, including through a Board paper on Review of FCS Engagement at end-2020. - Country engagement strategies: FCS teams will develop country engagement strategies that, drawing on relevant external expertise, will explicitly allow for thesocial and political context and the factors underpinning fragility; and lay the basis for full integration of capacity development (CD) with surveillance and lending. - Providing more sustained financial support: Staff is reviewing the lending toolkit for low-income countries to provide more tailored and flexible support, including for FCS, while ensuring uniformity of treatment. Staff will report on efforts to support FCS with protracted arrears to the Fund in the upcoming reviews of overdue financial obligations. - Practical steps to increase the impact of its CD support: Measures already in train will be complemented by the forthcoming Capacity Development (CD) Strategy Review’s assessment of initiatives to better integrate CD and Surveillance, including in FCS. Staff will also review the experience with provision of statistical and financial CD in FCS. And consideration will be given to establishing a FCS multi-donor trust fund or another suitable financing vehicle to address unmet needs for long-term experts. - Human Resources (HR) issues: The forthcoming phase of the HR Strategy will look into strategic workforce and career planning, including recruitment, and will consider actions to ensure that the Fund has appropriate staff expertise and experience to work effectively in fragile states. This will include the introduction of a “career” playbook that provides incentives for staff to be more responsive to the needs of the Fund in FCS. Adequacy of staffing allocations to FCS missions will be reviewed to ensure evenhanded treatment of the membership. Staff training on FCS will also be stepped up."

This paper sets out Management’s response to the Independent Evaluation Office’s (IEO) evaluation of IMF Response to the Financial and Economic Crisis. The implementation plan proposes specific actions focusing on the three of the four recommendations that received broad support from the Executive Board, namely (i) ensuring that the IMF as a quota-based institution has sufficient resources to contribute to future crisis resolution; (ii) developing guidelines for structuring engagements with other organizations, and (iii) consolidating and simplifying the current framework to identify and assess risks and vulnerabilities. Some of the proposed actions to address the Board-endorsed IEO recommendations are underway as part of the 2014 Triennial Surveillance Report (TSR) Action Plan, the FY2016–18 Medium-Term Budget and the ongoing efforts to ratify the 2010 Quota and Governance Reforms. The paper also explains how implementation will be monitored.

This paper presents a forward-looking implementation plan for Board-endorsed recommendations of the IEO Evaluation of IMF Interactions with Member Countries. Executive Directors welcomed the important insights offered into the effectiveness of these interactions, which are key to the Fund’s ability to achieve its goals. They broadly supported the need to enhance the traction of Fund surveillance, improve the effectiveness of outreach, and strengthen the management of interactions. Directors, nonetheless, “observed that the report covers principally the pre-crisis period, and significant progress has been made on several fronts since then.” In drawing up the implementation plan, this note focuses on points commanding broad support by the Executive Board, and builds on existing plans and ongoing reform initiatives that are broadly aligned with the evaluation’s recommendations.

The actions in this document aim at • Bringing the Fund’s framework for advice on capital flow policies up to date with recent research and lessons from experience. • Enhancing and coordinating a Fund-wide research • Ramping up the monitoring and analysis of capital flows. • Strengthening multilateral cooperation on policy issues affecting capital flows.

The Management Implementation Plan (MIP) proposes actions in response to the Board-endorsed recommendations provided by the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO)’s report on the IMF’s early response to the COVID pandemic. The two IEO recommendations aim for the Fund to (i) Develop special policies and procedures that could be quickly activated to address particular needs and circumstances of global crises and (ii) Take steps to reinforce the Fund’s institutional preparedness to deal with global crises and other large shocks. The MIP highlights how existing workstreams will be used to address part of the recommendations, specifically: (i) Drawing the lessons from the use of precautionary lending instruments during the pandemic and using them in the ongoing review of these facilities; (ii) Drawing the lessons from the implementation of governance safeguards in the context of covid-related emergency financing and respond to the actions identified in the final stocktaking; and (iii) Reviewing financial implications of covid-related lending on Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) resources in the regular updates on PRGT financing and resources. The MIP also defines new actions that aim to enhance the Fund’s preparedness to face future crises and are slated to be implemented by the end of FY25. These consists in: (i) Developing a crisis playbook, which will further codify Management’s commitment to an early participatory consultation with the Board in the event of a global crisis and inform the engagement with the Board on the broad strategy and institutional priorities for responding to the crisis; (ii) Enhancing the process of staff reallocation during a crisis through expanding the staff Talent Inventory to include skills and experience relevant in crises and examining HRD’s coordinating role in staff reallocation, as well as reviewing how recruitment processes could be made more agile in a crisis; (iii) Developing a strategy for surge capacity of the Crisis Management Team; (iv) Reviewing the experience of pandemic-related lending to low-income countries to consider the adequacy of access norms and the possible need for enhancements of the low-income lending toolkit against the long-term financial sustainability of the PRGT; and (v) Exploring ways to further strengthen the coordination with partners, especially the World Bank.

This Management Implementation Plan (MIP) proposes actions in response to the Board-endorsed recommendations provided by the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO)’s report on IMF and Capacity Development (CD). Staff has already begun addressing some of the IEO recommendations and several of the actions proposed in this MIP reflect initiatives in train. Resource implications are therefore expected to be manageable in the near term as these actions have mostly been incorporated into departmental work plans and budgets for fiscal year (FY) 2024. Medium-term resource implications will be discussed in the context of the FY 2025-FY 2026 medium-term budget proposals.

This paper fulfils the requirement of a forward-looking implementation plan for Board-endorsed recommendations of the IEO Evaluation of IMF Involvement in International Trade Policy Issues (“the Evaluation”). The Evaluation and the Executive Board’s conclusions provide impetus to re-prioritizing the Fund’s trade policy work. Table 1 sets out the Evaluation’s specific recommendations, Directors’ responses to them, and the proposals for implementation within this framework. Directors called for recommendations to be implemented within the existing resource envelope—including by achieving closer and more effective cooperation with the WTO—and this implementation plan therefore does not provide detailed costing of individual items.

This Management Implementation Plan (MIP) focuses on further strengthening collaboration between the IMF and the World Bank on strategic macro-structural issues. In macro-structural areas, the Fund and the Bank have complementary roles. The Bank provides structural and development-focused assessments and recommendations, while the Fund focuses on integrating macro relevant structural issues in the macroeconomic frameworks and policies. In some areas, including financial sector and public debt sustainability assessments, Bank-Fund collaboration modalities are well established. In other areas, such as climate change, Fund staff is developing comprehensive strategies on how the IMF can step up its engagement and collaboration with external partners, including with the World Bank, to better serve its membership. This MIP proposes concrete steps aimed at further enhancing: • Bank-Fund collaboration on strategic macro-structural issues, with an initial focus on the climate workstream; • Fund staff’s incentives for collaboration with external partners, including the Bank • Access to and exchange of information and knowledge between Bank and Fund staff.