International Governmental Organizations : International Monetary Fund

The formal name of the organization is International Monetary Fund.

According to its Overview page, the IMF "promotes international monetary cooperation and exchange rate stability, facilitates the balanced growth of international trade, and provides resources to help members in balance of payments difficulties or to assist with poverty reduction.

"The IMF has 189 member countries. It is a specialized agency of the United Nations but has its own charter, governing structure,and finances. Its members are represented through a quota system broadly based on their relative size in the global economy."

IMF Home page

About section includes information on the

• Organization and Finances
• Statutes and Decisions, including the Articles of Agreement and Bylaws Rules and Regulations

IMF Data and Statistics

• Has links to free databases and ones you have to register or subscribe to. If the word "order" is next to the database name, you will have to register or pay for access to the database.
• Free databases available from here include

  World Economic Outlook Databases (WEO)	International Financial Statistics (IFS)
  Balance of Payments Statistics (BOPS)	Coordinated Direct Investment Survey (CDIS)
  Several IMF Financial Data sets

Country Index: links to documents, reports, press releases, etc, that relate to specific countries. More than one country may be covered in a publication.

Publications

• This section seems to link to big publications on relatively broad topics.
• The Country Index described above has links to more specific documents.
• UW-Madison does NOT subscribe to the IMF eLibrary described on this page.

Documents and Publications section
From here, you can

• Use the Advanced Search form, from which you can search by
  • title
  • author/editor
  • subject/keyword
  • can limit the searches by series or keyword.
• Browse by
  • title
  • author/editor
  • subject/keyword
  • series (on the right side of the page)

The University of Wisconsin-Madison's libraries have print documents published by the IMF. Many are included in the library catalog.

Hints for searching the library catalog

• Search the name of the organization (or subsidiary body) in the
  • Authors/creators box to find publications issued by the organization
  • Subjects box to find publications about the organization
• Type phrases in quotation marks. Example:
  • "International Monetary Fund"
• I would not search for materials using the acronym IMF; you will not get many results.

• Some IGOs use British spellings of words in their names.

  Try both American and British English-language spellings if you're not getting many results. Common words affected by this:

   

  American spelling	British spelling
  center	centre
  defense	defence
  organization	organisation
  program	programme