Global Financial Safety Net Tracker Database Methodology Guidebook

The Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) is a set of institutions and mechanisms that provide insurance against crises and financing to mitigate their impacts. It has four main elements: countries’ own international reserves; bilateral swap arrangements whereby central banks exchange currencies to provide liquidity to banking systems; regional financial arrangements (RFAs) by which countries pool resources to leverage financing in a crisis; and resources and lending from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The total amount of available crisis finance resources currently stands at more than $3.5 trillion as of December 2023.

The Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) Tracker is the first global, interactive database that measures the annual lending capacity of the IMF, RFAs, central banks and the total amount of financing to mitigate the financial impact of the COVID-19 crisis via loans from the IMF, RFAs and currency swaps. The interactive is co-produced by the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, Freie Universität Berlin and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The GFSN Tracker comprises two components:

• The Annual Lending Capacity tab shows a country’s access limit to crisis finance in the GFSN that can be obtained from the three primary sources: the IMF, RFAs and central bank currency swaps. The data displayed estimates the maximum crisis financing available to a country from either the IMF or RFAs, if the country is a member of an RFA. Furthermore, the lending capacity shows the total of central bank currency swaps that a country’s central bank has with a counterparty central bank in a given year, as an approximation of the potentially bilaterally available amount of liquidity to draw.
• The COVID-19 Financing Arrangements tab tracks financing arrangements since the COVID-19 crisis, displaying the total amount of financing via loans from the IMF, RFAs and from currency swaps that were deployed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the first COVID-19 tracking source that includes a regularly updated overview of all RFA loans disbursed and agreed central bank currency swaps in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Global Financial Safety Net Tracker Database Methodology Guidebook by Laurissa Mühlich, William N. Kring and Barbara Fritz discusses the database scopes, definitions and data collection methodologies used in GFSN Tracker and provides answers to frequently asked questions.