Exchange rate surveillance has always been at the core of the IMF’s responsibilities. Throughout its existence, the Fund has strived to strengthen its framework for assessing exchange rates, adapting it to underlying macroeconomic and financial developments in member countries. As part of this mandate, since the mid-1990s the Consultative Group on Exchange Rate Issues (CGER) has provided exchange rate assessments for a number of advanced economies from a multilateral perspective, with the aim of informing the country-specific analysis of Article IV Staff Reports and fostering multilateral consistency.

The rapid increase in international trade and financial integration over the past decade and the growing importance of emerging markets in world trade and GDP have inspired the IMF to place stronger emphasis on multilateral surveillance, macro-financial linkages, and the implications of globalization. The IMF's Consultative Group on Exchange Rate Issues (CGER)--formed in the mid-1990s to provide exchange rate assessments for a number of advanced economies from a multilateral perspective--has therefore broadened its mandate to cover both key advanced economies and major emerging market economies. This Occasional Paper summarizes the methodologies that underpin the expanded analysis.

Exchange rate surveillance has always been at the core of the IMF's responsibilities. Throughout its existence, the Fund has strived to strengthen its framework for assessing exchange rates, adapting it to underlying macroeconomic and financial developments in member countries. As part of this mandate, since the mid-1990s the Consultative Group on Exchange Rate Issues (CGER) has provided exchange rate assessments for a number of advanced economies from a multilateral perspective, with the aim of informing the country-specific analysis of Article IV Staff Reports and fostering multilateral consistency.

The rapid increase in international trade and financial integration over the past decade and the growing importance of emerging markets in world trade and GDP have inspired the IMF to place stronger emphasis on multilateral surveillance, macro-financial linkages, and the implications of globalization. The IMF's Consultative Group on Exchange Rate Issues (CGER)--formed in the mid-1990s to provide exchange rate assessments for a number of advanced economies from a multilateral perspective--has therefore broadened its mandate to cover both key advanced economies and major emerging market economies. This Occasional Paper summarizes the methodologies that underpin the expanded analysis.

The IMF's Consultative Group on Exchange Rate issues (CGER) has been conducting exchange rate assessments as part of the surveillance process since 1997. This paper evaluates CGER assessments from 1997 to 2006, by comparing these to subsequent movements in real effective exchange rates (REER). We find that CGER's estimated misalignments have predictive power over future REER movements, especially over longer horizons and after changes in fundamentals are accounted for. But while CGER misalignments frequently predict the direction of currency movements correctly, misalignments have tended to be persistent, resulting in systematic errors-overprediction for undervalued currencies and underprediction for overvalued currencies.

The External Balance Assessment (EBA) methodology has been developed by the IMF’s Research Department as a successor to the CGER methodology for assessing current accounts and exchange rates in a multilaterally consistent manner. Compared to other approaches, EBA emphasizes distinguishing between the positive empirical analysis and the normative assessment of current accounts and exchange rates, and highlights the roles of policies and policy distortions. This paper provides a comprehensive description and discussion of the 2013 version (“2.0”) of the EBA methodology, including areas for its further development.

The IMF's internal analysis of exchange rate issues has been guided by, and limited by, the conceptual and empirical frameworks that have emerged from the collective research of the economics profession. The research has provided several general approaches that are useful for assessing whether countries exchange rates seem broadly appropriate. One involves the calculation of purchasing power-party (PPP) measure or international competitiveness indicators. A second, known as the macroeconomic balance framework, focuses on the extent to which prevailing exchange rates and policies are consistent with simultaneous internal and external equilibrium over the medium run. Some recent extensions of the macroeconomic balance approach and the manner in which it is applied by the IMF staff are described in this paper.