A handful of governments still resist making public the detailed reports on their economies done by the International Monetary Fund.
Publication of the documents is presumed but not mandatory under IMF rules. An annual IMF report summarizes who objected to publication. The latest report is dated Sept. 27, 2023.
Under Article IV of the IMF’s Articles of Agreement, the IMF holds bilateral discussions with all members, usually every year. A staff team visits the country, collects economic and financial information, and discusses with officials the country’s economic developments and policies. The resulting documents are the so-called Article IV reports and the accompanying “staff reports.”
In 2021, there were four countries who declined to release either report: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Kiribati and Turkmenistan.
In 2020, two countries opted not to publish: Tajikistan and the Republic of United Arab Emirates, according to the IMF report for that year.
In 2019, the IMF report said seven countries resisted disclosure: Bahrain, Mauritania, Oman, Tajikistan, Eritrea, Turkmenistan and Tanzania.
Some countries appear to regularly prevent disclosure, such as Turkmenistan and Bahrain. Others have allowed publication in some years and not in others, such as Tanzania and Mauritania. The reports indicate which countries did allow release of the reports, but do not tally which countries have never permitted disclosure. Calls and e-mails to the IMF staffers who authored the report went unanswered.
The overall publication rate for the documents in 2021 was 96 percent, the report says, the same rate as in 2020. Advanced economies continue to publish all reports, according to the IMF. The non-publishing countries typically are from emerging and developing Asia, and Middle East and Central Asia.
The report also indicates how many deletions were made. After reviewing the draft reports, governments may request deletions under the IMF’s rules, most of which are rejected.
For emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) there were 29 deletion requests. Of these, 32 percent were approved, 10 percent partially rejected and 59 percent rejected.
“Overall, rejections of deletion requests were motivated almost entirely on the grounds that the information under consideration was sufficiently general to not create a clear risk of triggering a disruptive market reaction in the near-term,” the report states.
Country documents published with deletions represented 2 percent of all 152 published reports in 2021.
The country reports do not indicate where deletions have been made.
The transparency report also provides data on the timing of publication. “The publication lag for advanced economies, for example, is just over a half of that for emerging market and developing economies (8 vs 15 days),” the report states. There were 13 members with publication lags higher than 28 days in 2021.
Footnote on Footnote
The IMF continues to link to different, and outdated version of its transparency policy.
Footnote 1 in the new Article IV transparency report purportedly links to the IMF transparency policy, but the link goes to an outdated 2005 document.
On the IMF’s revised website page on transparency, the link to the transparency policy goes to a 2013 document. Amendments have been made since then, including in 2022. (See August 2022 EYE article.)
EYE wrote about the apparent lack of a link to a current version of the transparency policy when the IMF launched the new page on transparency. The link to the 2013 document remains. (See April 2023 article.)
