IMF Lending Under the Resilience and Sustainability Trust: An Initial Assessment

This paper provides an early assessment of five initial programs supported by the IMF’s new facility supported by the Resilience and Sustainability Trust to address two long-term challenges, climate change and pandemic preparedness. We find that its operations can be strengthened to better achieve the underlying objectives. They include: paying greater attention to depth of program measures; ensuring that the overall number of program conditions are not excessive to unduly strain the capacity of countries; better coordinating program support with the provision of diagnostics by international financial institutions identifying reform measures to be included in the program; reporting the share of climate-related investment in total investment in countries receiving support from the new facility; and including measures to prepare for pandemics in the subsequent programs.