The Catalytic Impact of Resilience and Sustainability Arrangements

The Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF), which was added to the IMF’s lending toolkit in 2022, provides affordable longer-term financing to support countries undertaking macrocritical reforms to reduce risks to prospective BoP stability emanating from extreme weather events and pandemics. This paper draws early lessons from RSF arrangements by exploring whether they have been able to meet one of their core objectives, namely catalyzing financing from other sources. A multipronged approach is used consisting of a survey of country teams, an econometric study, and analysis of non-traditional data. According to a survey of IMF country teams most countries with RSF arrangements received climate finance, mainly from synergies with public sources. The econometric analysis shows that approval of an RSF is associated with increased MDB climate finance and Official Development Assistance (ODA) in low-income countries, thus strengthening the RSF’s link to BoP stability. Non-traditional data drawing from news media and labor market developments point to potential higher financing in the future.