In March, the website IMF Monitor published a new dataset dedicated to tracking IMF financing arrangements requested and approved in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The data, which are updated fortnightly, include clear overviews of IMF Covid-19 lending in relation to countries’ risk of debt distress, the type of financing approved by region and income group, and size of the loans in relation to a countries’ quota. Christina Laskaridis with SOAS University of London, the researcher behind the dataset, explained, “I wanted to unpick the IMF’s ‘lend now, worry later’ approach to the pandemic and the tracker is a way to aggregate in one place the scale and structure of the IMF’s financing.”

IMF Monitor also hosts the Article IV scanner, a tool that enables easy searches of IMF surveillance, as well as the first freely available, comprehensive and transparent database of IMF conditionality (see Observer Summer 2019, Winter 2017-2018).