Global Financial Safety Net Tracker Database Methodology Guidebook, 2025

The Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) is a set of institutions and mechanisms that provide insurance against crises and financing to mitigate their impacts. It has four main elements: countries’ own international reserves; bilateral swap arrangements whereby central banks exchange currencies to provide liquidity to banking systems; regional financial arrangements (RFAs) by which countries pool resources to leverage financing in a crisis; and resources and lending from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The total amount of available crisis finance resources stands at least $4.2 trillion as of the end of 2024.

The GFSN Tracker is the first global, interactive database that measures the annual lending capacity of the IMF, RFAs and central banks. Moreover, since the COVID-19 crisis, it measures the total amount of financing from the IMF, RFAs and central bank swaps to mitigate the financial impact of shocks. The interactive is co-produced by the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, Freie Universität Berlin and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The GFSN Tracker comprises two components:

• The Annual Lending Capacity tab shows a country’s access limit to crisis finance in the GFSN that can be obtained from the three primary sources: the IMF, RFAs and central bank currency swaps. The data displayed estimates the maximum crisis financing available to a country from either the IMF or RFAs, if the country is a member of an RFA. Furthermore, the lending capacity shows the total of central bank currency swaps that a country’s central bank has with a counterparty central bank in a given year, as an approximation of the potential amount available from these arrangements.

• The Actual Financing Arrangements tab tracks financing arrangements since the COVID-19 crisis, displaying the total amount of financing via loans from the IMF, RFAs and currency swaps. This is the first tracking source that includes a regularly updated overview of all RFA loans disbursed and agreed central bank currency swaps since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Global Financial Safety Net Tracker Database Methodology Guidebook by Laurissa Mühlich, Marina Zucker-Marques, Barbara Fritz and William N. Kring discusses the database scopes, definitions and data collection methodologies used in GFSN Tracker and provides answers to frequently asked questions.