Who Reveals? Transparency and the IMF's Article IV Consultations (original) (raw)

A dramatic change has taken place in the manner in which the IMF conducts its annual surveillance of member state economies. These annual consultations (known as Article IV consultations) were originally viewed as private matters that were never intended to be made public. Starting in 1997, the IMF released summary information about a country's consultation on a voluntary basis. Recently, countries could choose to release the consultation team's report itself, which is prepared for discussion by the Fund's Executive Board. Despite these new efforts at transparency, only about 70-80% of these Article IV reports are made public in a given year. The proposed paper aims to explore the sources of this variation.