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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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This volume book brings together nine background papers prepared for an evaluation by the IMF Independent Evaluation Office of “the IMF and the crises in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal.” It presents an authoritative work on the evolving relationship between the IMF and the euro area, a common currency area founded in 1999 consisting of advanced, highly integrated economies in Europe. The euro area, or any common currency area for that matter, has posed challenges to the IMF’s operational activities as its Articles of Agreement contain no provision for joint membership. The challenges became intense when a series of crises erupted in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal from 2009 to 2011, and the Fund was called upon to help intervene by offering its financing and crisis management expertise. The IMF found itself in uncharted territory where there was no precedent or established procedure. The chapters, many of which are prepared by prominent academics and former senior IMF officials who are thoroughly familiar with internal procedures, discuss various aspects of the IMF’s engagement with the euro area, including precrisis surveillance, how key decisions were made, how the IMF collaborated with European institutions, and how it designed and implemented its lending programs with the three crisis countries. The book gives prominence to governance-related issues, given the large voting share (of more than 20 percent) within the IMF of euro area members and the subsequent public perception that the IMF treated the euro area more favorably than it does developing and emerging market members. The approaches are both cross-cutting and country-based. Some chapters deal with issues related to the euro area as a whole, while others focus on how the Fund engaged with individual euro area countries. The book contains a statement on the IEO evaluation by the IMF Managing Director and a Summing Up of the Executive Board discussion held in July 2016.

The IMF's surveillance over its member'seconomic policies is one of the institution's central activities. In keeping with the increasing transparency of the IMF; the Executive Board askes a group of independent external experts to evaluate IMF surveillance, to assess the effectiveness of such surveillance, and to make recommendations for improvements. The group's report looks at the methods, substance, and impact of surveillance, both on individual countries and on the global economy. This publication also includes the reactions of the Executive Board, management, and the staff to the external evaluation.