The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will work with Argentina’s new economy minister Silvina Batakis to strengthen macroeconomic stability and address the country’s “profound challenges,” a spokesperson said on Monday. Batakis was sworn in on Monday afternoon after her predecessor Martin Guzman abruptly resigned over the weekend. Source: Reuters (Reporting by Jorgelina do Rosario; Writing by Carolina Pulice; Editing by Kim Coghill)

Nearly 20% of International Monetary Fund staff say their work has been “unduly influenced” by supervisors, according to an internal survey released on Thursday as part of a review of data integrity standards that generally found “robust mechanisms” for institutional governance. The review was launched last year by the IMF’s Executive Board following allegations in September 2021 that IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva pressured World Bank staff to alter data to favour China in 2017 when she was chief executive of the development lender. After a weeks-long probe of the ...

The U.S. dollar’s share of currency reserves reported to the International Monetary Fund was 58.8% in the first quarter, unchanged from that of the last three months of 2021, IMF data showed on Thursday. The greenback remains the largest-held currency reserve by global central banks. The euro’s share, however, slipped to 20% in the first quarter from 20.6% in the previous three months. In 2009, the euro hit its highest share at 28%. Global reserves, which are reported in U.S. dollars, are assets of central banks held in different currencies ...

Paris/Rome – The global agrifood sector faces fundamental challenges over the coming decade, particularly the need to feed an ever-increasing population in a sustainable manner, the impacts of the climate crisis and the economic consequences and disruptions to food supply linked to the war in Ukraine, according to a report released today by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2022-2031 focuses on assessing the medium-term prospects for agricultural commodity markets. The findings of ...

Governments confront difficult policy choices as they try to shield their people from record food prices and soaring energy costs driven higher by the war in Ukraine. Countries introduced a variety of policy measures in response to this unprecedented surge in prices of the most crucial commodities. Our survey of these announced measures by member nations shows that many governments tried to limit the rise in domestic prices as international prices increased, either by cutting taxes or providing direct price subsidies. But such support measures in turn create new pressures ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief said that there is “a narrowing path” to avoiding a U.S. recession, highlighting “significant downside risks” this year and especially next year. “Based on the policy path outlined at the June FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) meeting, and an expected reduction in the fiscal deficit, we expected the U.S. economy will slow,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said at a virtual press conference on the annual Article IV consultation to review the U.S. economy. With inflation well above the Federal Reserve’s longer-run goal and ...

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Friday underscored the importance of fighting inflation now to shore up the prospects for economic growth in the future, warning that doing so could cause “some pain” to consumers in the short run. “Success over time (in lowering prices) will be beneficial for global growth, but some pain to get to that success can be a necessary price to pay,” Kristalina Georgieva said, as the IMF cut its U.S. growth forecast for 2022 by 0.8 percentage point to 2.9%. Georgieva said the ...

Public support for agriculture has reached record levels as governments enacted measures to shield both consumers and producers from the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises, according to a new report from the OECD. Only a small share of this support has been directed at longer-term efforts to combat climate change and other food systems challenges. Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2022 shows that the 54 countries monitored – including all OECD and EU economies, plus 11 key emerging economies – provided on average USD 817 billion of support to agriculture ...

Key progress has been made in talks on the revival of Pakistan’s International Monetary Fund bailout programme, both sides said on Wednesday, with Islamabad expecting the lender to increase the size and duration of the 39-month, $6 billion facility. The statements came as Pakistan’s economy teeters on the brink of a financial crisis, with foreign exchange reserves drying up fast and the Pakistani rupee at record lows against the U.S. dollar as uncertainty surrounded the IMF programme. “Discussions between the IMF staff and the authorities on policies to strengthen macroeconomic ...

In the first quarter of 2022, gross domestic product (GDP) in the G20 area rose by 0.7% quarter-on-quarter according to provisional estimates, down from the 1.3% increase recorded in the fourth quarter of 2021. The slowdown in the G20 area in Q1 2022 mainly reflects weaker performance in the United States,1 where GDP contracted by 0.4% quarter-on-quarter after rising by 1.7% in Q4 2021. This was mainly due to changes in net trade (exports minus imports) and decreases in inventory investment (destocking) and in government spending on COVID-19 assistance. In ...

Growth may lose momentum in the OECD area as a whole over the next six to nine months, according to the latest OECD Composite Leading Indicators (CLIs). The latest leading indicators, which aim to anticipate cyclical fluctuations in economic activity, support the view presented in the latest OECD Economic Outlook, which revised global growth forecasts downwards due to the impact of the war in Ukraine and continued supply-chain disruptions. The CLIs are now either at or below long-term trend levels in most major OECD economies. Pushed down by high inflation ...

Ending the use of coal and replacing it with renewable energy sources will result in an estimated net gain of $78 trillion globally by the end of this century, according to research by the International Monetary Fund. This amounts to about four fifths of the world’s gross domestic product currently, and would be equal to about 1.2 per cent of annual global economic output during the period, the fund said in a blog post. “The most common concern about scrapping coal is that replacing it with renewable energy would be ...

The International Monetary Fund expects to further cut its forecast for global economic growth in 2022 next month, an IMF spokesperson said on Thursday, following moves by the World Bank and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to cut their own forecasts this week. That would mark the IMF’s third downgrade this year. In April, the IMF had already slashed its forecast for global economic growth by nearly a full percentage point to 3.6% in 2022 and 2023. Fund spokesperson Gerry Rice told a regular IMF briefing that the ...

The yen’s recent “significant” depreciation reflects fundamentals, such as market expectations of differing monetary policy paths between Japan and the United States, a senior International Monetary Fund (IMF) official said on Thursday (Jun 9). Ranil Salgado, the IMF’s Japan mission chief, said the yen’s recent moves against the dollar had been strongly correlated with Japan-US interest-rate differentials. Rising global raw material prices had also weighed on the yen, because Japan, a major commodity importer, must pay more dollars, he said. “We believe that the yen’s movements reflect fundamentals,” Salgado told ...

The unemployment rate in the OECD fell further to 5.0% in April 2022, from 5.1% in March. This continues a positive trend for the OECD, which has now recorded 12 months of falling unemployment (Figure 1). The unemployment rate was equal to or below the pre-pandemic rate in three quarters of OECD countries in April (Figure 2). Moreover, the number of unemployed workers in the OECD also continued to fall, reaching 34.0 million, 0.5 million below the pre-pandemic level. A decline in the OECD unemployment rate was recorded for women ...