IMF announces closing of office in Brazil

After 23 years with representation in the country, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced today (16) the closing of its office in Brazil. The unit in Brasília will close on June 30, 2022, when the mandate of the current representative of the agency in the country will end.

As of that date, the Brazilian government will communicate with the IMF only through contacts with its headquarters in Washington. Yesterday (15), the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, had announced that he had signed the document to end cooperation between the Brazilian government and the multilateral organization.

"The IMF closed an agreement with the Brazilian authorities to close the IMF's Representative Office in Brasília by June 30, 2022," the IMF said in a note. The agency informed that it intends to maintain good relations with Brazil.

“We hope the high quality of Fund staff engagement with Brazilian authorities will continue as we work closely to support Brazil in strengthening its economic policy and institutional settings,” the IMF added in the statement.

Opened in 1999, when Brazil went through an economic crisis and resorted to loans from the agency, the office originally had the function of monitoring whether the country was complying with the conditions required to release the relief credit lines. Brazil's last agreement with the Monetary Fund ended in 2005, but the office was kept to facilitate dialogue between the agency's technical staff and Brazilian authorities, mainly to recommend public policies and economic practices.

At an event with businessmen, yesterday, in São Paulo, Guedes criticized recent IMF forecasts about the performance of the Brazilian economy. In recent months, the economic team and the international organization have diverged on econometric models to estimate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in moments of instability, such as a pandemic.

“I will even say gently that we are dismissing the IMF. They've been here for a long time, there was a lot of imbalance. And I signed [the office closing agreement]. You can come back, you can walk outside. They came here to predict a 9.7% drop, and England was going to drop 4%. We are down 4%; England, 9.7%. We think it's better for them to make predictions elsewhere”, declared Guedes, at an event at the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (Fiesp).

Text translated using artificial intelligence.