By Judith Ugwumadu | 17 October 2014

The International Monetary Fund and a group of extractive experts have teamed up to improve transparency and consistency of government revenues from ‘resource-rich countries’. 

The fund developed a framework in close consultation with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and other stakeholders to collect data and report information on such revenues. The framework was based on the revenue classifications of the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014.

Louis Marc Ducharme, director of the IMF’s statistics department, said: ‘The public availability of reliable data on government revenues that facilitates fiscal analysis in resource-rich countries is an important objective of the IMF’s statistics department. This collaboration with the EITI will contribute significantly to reaching this objective.’

EITI is a global coalition of governments, companies and civil society working together to improve openness and accountable management of revenues from natural resources. 

Its resource transparency standard is currently being implemented in 48 countries, including Chad, Nigeria, Iraq, Guatemala, Ukraine, the Philippines, Norway, the US and UK.

The standard requires widespread disclosure of information from the country’s natural resource sector, which enables the public to better judge whether the sector is well managed.

The IMF said the governments of the EITI countries, as well as other resource-rich countries, can use the new framework to present their revenue data in an analytically relevant and cross-country comparable format.

Head of the EITI international secretariat Jonas Moberg added: ‘Improving public understanding of government revenues from natural resources is a core principle of the EITI. This collaboration with the IMF will improve consistency and quality of the EITI data across countries.’