EIEE Seminar-Webinar

Title: Greening the International Monetary Fund

Speaker: Alex Kentikelenis, Università Bocconi

Abstract: The International Monetary Fund (IMF)—a key player in global economic governance and the world’s lender of last resort—has recently taken a leading role in policy debates on climate change and the green transition. The organization introduced its Climate Strategy in 2021, committing to scale up engagement with macro-critical climate issues, and established the Resilience and Sustainability Facility in 2022 to provide financial support to countries facing adaptation and mitigation challenges. Overall, the IMF’s closer engagement with the economic dimensions of climate change holds the promise of helping countries pre-empt large scale economic dislocations from environmental risks.

This talk—based on a forthcoming book—addresses a set of interrelated questions: How much progress has the IMF made in supporting the green transition? What is the policy track-record of the IMF’s climate loans? How do regular IMF loans and their mandated reforms encompass climate considerations? How have the IMF’s economic surveillance activities considered climate risks? Based on new evidence, the findings point to the multifaceted, and at times contradictory, ways in which green transition objectives have become embedded within the IMF’s activities.