Washington, DC: On September 17, 2026, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded the 2026 Comprehensive Surveillance Review (CSR), which sets strategic and operational priorities for strengthening IMF surveillance to better support members in the years ahead.
The 2026 CSR examines progress since the last comprehensive review concluded in May 2021. It finds that surveillance continues to add value, helping members navigate complex policy challenges and manage risks amid profound shifts in the global landscape driven by digitalization and AI, geoeconomic fragmentation, climate change, and demographic shifts.
The confluence of these forces in a world of more frequent shocks and high uncertainty, together with the already elevated debt levels, is making it more difficult for countries to safeguard stability and sustain growth. The 2026 CSR's overarching goal is to strengthen members' resilience-the capacity to withstand, adapt to, and recover from shocks-which is critical for economic stability and sustainability.
To advance this objective, the CSR sets three strategic priorities for Fund surveillance: supporting resilience and growth through more granular, tailored, and integrated policy advice; strengthening external stability through more comprehensive external sector and spillover analysis; and enhancing countries' risk management capacity through robust risk assessments and contingent policy advice.
The 2026 CSR also underscores the importance of flexible and risk-based surveillance supported by strategic development and deployment of staff's expertise, where it is most relevant for member countries. The CSR seeks to strengthen prioritization by clarifying the application of the macrocriticality criterion in bilateral surveillance and providing principles for assessing the need for and modalities of institutional engagement in new, non-traditional policy areas. The CSR also proposes modernizing surveillance modalities, including through more agile and continuous surveillance, enhanced regional and plurilateral engagement, better integration of bilateral, multilateral surveillance and capacity development, use of AI tools with guardrails, streamlining of surveillance requirements, and lengthening the A-IV cycle in countries with Fund-supported programs.
The CSR's main findings and recommendations are discussed in the Overview Paper, which builds on extensive and novel background work, including Traction of Article IV Policy Advice, Financial Sector Coverage and Macrofinancial Integration in Article IV Consultations, Selected Operational Issues, and Stakeholder Surveys.
The 2026 CSR is part of a comprehensive update and upgrade of the IMF's toolkit to better help members navigate a shock-prone and transforming global economy. The CSR is closely aligned with other ongoing reviews of IMF policy frameworks and institutional workstreams-including the 2026 Review of Program Design and Conditionally , the 2026 FSAP Review , and the 2026 Review of the Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries - to help ensure coherence across efforts to strengthen the Fund's support to members. This includes work on capacity development, fragile and conflict-affected states, and external sector assessment.
Executive Board Assessment [1]
Executive Directors welcomed the 2026 Comprehensive Surveillance Review (CSR). They reaffirmed the 2012 Integrated Surveillance Decision (ISD) as an appropriate overarching framework for Fund surveillance, while noting that the CSR provides an opportunity to adapt surveillance practices to evolving policy challenges, risks, and members' needs. Directors noted that frequent and overlapping shocks, elevated uncertainty, constrained policy space, and structural transformations are making members' policy challenges increasingly complex. Against this backdrop, they broadly supported the CSR's proposed strategic and operational priorities, which aim to strengthen surveillance and bolster members' resilience, thereby supporting the stability and sustainability of member countries and the effective functioning of the international monetary system (IMS).
Strategic Priorities for Surveillance
Directors supported the proposals to bolster countries' resilience and growth. They welcomed efforts to provide more granular and integrated policy advice, including through more coherent macroeconomic frameworks, realistic debt and financing projections, more specific monetary policy advice, stronger macro-financial integration, and better prioritized structural policy recommendations. Directors emphasized that advice should be better tailored, reflecting institutional capacity, political economy considerations, and distributional impacts. On monetary policy, they welcomed that staff's analyses would not include mechanical or normative benchmarks for the policy path, and many Directors cautioned against overly prescriptive guidance from staff on the future path of monetary policy, emphasizing the importance of safeguards for the publication and communication of such guidance.
Directors supported strengthening external sector surveillance through more comprehensive and forward-looking analysis of imbalances, vulnerabilities, domestic-external linkages, capital flows, trade and industrial policies, and relevant outward spillovers. They emphasized that such assessments should be timely, consistent, evenhanded, and closely linked to the overall policy mix, particularly for systemically important economies whose policies may affect the effective operation of the IMS. Directors noted the importance of maintaining attention to inward spillovers alongside strengthened analysis of outward spillovers. Directors endorsed maintaining the Fund's current approach to the coverage of security-motivated policies, which includes assessing their economic implications where macrocritical. A few Directors called for a more systematic assessment of spillovers from trade-distorting measures, including primary and secondary sanctions.
[1] At the conclusion of the discussion, the Managing Director, as Chairman of the Board, summarizes the views of Executive Directors, and this summary is transmitted to the country's authorities. An explanation of any qualifiers used in summings up can be found here: http://www.IMF.org/external/np/sec/misc/qualifiers.htm .
