IMF, U.K. in Joint Research on Developing Country Policy Issues

Shortage of high-quality policy research on low-income countries

IMF, U.K. Department for International Development jointly aim to fill gap

Collaboration intended to produce research that is actually used

The three-year project aims to raise the profile of low–income country research, drawing on collaboration between IMF staff members and project-funded researchers to produce high-quality research papers. Additional goals are to expand the network of low–income country researchers and to influence the uptake or traction of the research outputs by high-level policymakers in low–income countries and in the IMF.

With the external environment as uncertain as ever, and daunting developmental goals unmet, low-income countries are still facing a whirlwind of macroeconomic challenges. The IMF’s joint project with the United Kingdom’s DFID therefore sets out to study six broad, macroeconomic policy issues critical for low–income country policymakers: monetary and exchange rate policies; public investment, growth, and debt sustainability; natural resource wealth management; macro policies and income distribution; financial deepening; and growth through diversification.

To further maximize the policy impact of the project’s research outputs, the collaboration focuses on developing practical frameworks and tools that are accessible to country authorities, IMF staff members, and low–income country researchers. Direct cooperation with clients is also a crucial component of the project, and team members have traveled to Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and Rwanda, among other countries, to provide training, hold seminars, and collaborate on new research.

Feed into policy

The project team wants to ensure that research findings and analytic frameworks are feeding into policy discussions, getting traction, and being disseminated to a wide audience. Accordingly, in addition to direct collaboration with IMF country teams and authorities, their work has included presentations at high-level policy conferences, commissioned papers, project-financed conferences, and a quarterly e-newsletter for a broad network of low-income country researchers and policymakers.

The project has also brought much-needed attention to the importance of low–income country research at the Fund. “The IMF-DFID project is pushing the frontier in producing new research in areas that are high on the policy agenda of the Fund’s low-income country members,” said IMF Deputy Managing Director Min Zhu...