Albania · IMF Credit Outstanding, % of GDP

## What this measures

What Albania owes the International Monetary Fund at the end of each year (Use of IMF Credit and Loans: GRA purchases plus PRGT and RST loans), as a percent of that year's GDP in US dollars.

## Why it matters

A country borrows from the IMF when it cannot borrow enough elsewhere, usually in or near a balance-of-payments crisis, and the loan comes with policy conditions. Who owes the Fund, and how much relative to the size of its economy, maps where those crises are.

## How to read it

Sets the debt to the Fund against the size of the economy, so large and small borrowers can be compared. Zero means no IMF credit outstanding at year-end.

## What it does not say

Covers the IMF's own lending (General Resources Account purchases and PRGT and RST loans), not World Bank or bilateral loans. Amounts are owed in SDRs; the US-dollar figure moves with the SDR's exchange rate even when nothing is borrowed or repaid. GDP in US dollars falls sharply when a currency collapses, which pushes the ratio up in exactly the years a country turns to the IMF.

## Source

International Monetary Fund, Fund Accounts (FA), with GDP from the World Economic Outlook, read from the IMF data API (api.imf.org, dataflow IMF.STA/FA and IMF.RES/WEO). https://data.imf.org/ Attribution: Source: International Monetary Fund. Transformations by Palanor where stated. Transformation by Palanor: year-end credit outstanding in US dollars (FA, CLIMF_USD, annual) divided by GDP in US dollars for the same year from the newest World Economic Outlook, times 100. A Palanor calculation; the IMF does not publish this ratio. IMF data is available free of charge from the IMF. Use follows the IMF Copyright and Usage terms, Special Terms for Statistical Data (imf.org/en/About/copyright-and-terms).