International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The IMF is one of several international agencies that historically collect and process statistics on national accounting and balance of payments for its member countries, which include almost all sovereign member countries of the United Nations. The Fund’s statistics include some widely used databases in the academic arena, namely, Balance of Payments and International Investment Position (IIP) Statistics, External Debt Statistics, Government Finance Statistics, International Financial Statistics (IFS) Online Service, World Economic Outlook Databases, etc. International Financial Statistics is a standard source of international statistics on all aspects of international and domestic finance; it contains time series data from 1948 and provides data on exchange rates, international liquidity, international banking, money and banking, interest rates, prices, production, international transactions, government accounts, and national accounts.
The IMF, jointly with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank, disseminates data on external debt, which are obtained primarily from creditor and market sources. The data cover the external debt of developing and transition countries and territories, and also include statistics on international reserves. See http://www.imfstatistics.org/imf/.
Instructions on updating GDP data using IMF growth rate forecast
This GDP series is a history and forecast series. The historical values are derived from the original GDP2011 series in IFs. All values 2010 and beyond, are calculated using WEO’s GDP growth rate data. The April 2016 version of this data was used for this iteration of this series. The calculated values go from 2010-2021.
To calculate the GDP for a Country/Year: GDPt-1 + (GDPt-1 * (GDP Growth Rate/100))
For the countries that were lacking growth rate data, I simply left their GDP data as it is in the original GDP2011 data. These countries will not have data up to 2021 because of this.
Countries without GDP growth rate data in WEO:
- Cuba
- Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
- Palestine
- Syria (post 2010)
The growth rate data was found here: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2016/01/weodata/download.aspx
In the WEO data the Subject Descriptor is Gross domestic product, constant prices and the Units are Percent change