Macroeconomic Diagnostics (MDS)

Course details

Target Audience:

Mid- to senior-level officials in central banks and ministries of finance or economy directly involved in diagnosing the state of the macroeconomy and making projections.

Qualification:

Applicants should have an advanced degree in economics or equivalent experience, good quantitative skills, and proficiency in the use of computers to analyze data.

Language:

The course is conducted in English only. Due to the technical nature of the course, English proficiency is a prerequisite.

Course Description:

This course, presented by the IMF-CEF and the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development (ICD) staff, aims to strengthen participants’ ability to assess a country’s macroeconomic situation, emphasizing practical tools for use in day-to-day macroeconomic analysis of developments in complex economies. The course draws heavily on actual country experiences, emphasizing diagnostic and analytic tools that typically are not well covered in macroeconomics textbooks or in university courses. The lectures and corresponding workshops cover three broad types of assessments:

•  The current state of the macroeconomy, including developments in aggregate productivity and demand, inflation, labor markets, asset markets, and the external sector.
•  Fiscal and monetary policies from a positive (rather than normative) perspective. Are these policies expansionary or contractionary? What impacts do these policies have on the macroenomy, and why?
•  Medium-term prospects for the country, including sustainability of public and external debt trajectories, potential misevaluation of the real exchange rate, and balance sheet vulnerabilities in a country’s financial sector, non-financial corporations, and public sector.

Participants are expected to actively participate in discussions throughout the course. For practical workshops that implement the diagnostic and analytical tools presented in the lectures, participants are divided into small groups, each directed by a counselor.