IMF to identify Chinese yuan in foreign exchange reserves database

PanARMENIAN.Net - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced it will separately identify the Chinese yuan in its quarterly survey of the composition of foreign exchange reserves (COFER) from October 1, Business Standard said.

Currently, the currencies identified in COFER are the U.S. dollar, the pound sterling, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar and the euro, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday, March 5.

This move recognizes the continuing internationalization of the yuan, facilitated by China's reforms to promote a more market-based economy, the IMF said on Friday.

It means that IMF members could record their holdings of yuan-denominated official reserves as in the COFER survey.

The COFER lists the currency composition of holdings of foreign exchange reserves across the IMF members in the form of statistical aggregates. The IMF publishes the COFER data quarterly and its members voluntarily participate in the COFER survey.

When the IMF's executive board determined the yuan to be a freely usable currency and decided to include it in the Special Drawing Right (SDR) basket last November, they also underscored the importance of making efforts to address remaining data gaps ahead of the next SDR review.

The IMF board on February 26 agreed to identify the yuan in the COFER survey in order to address data gaps.

The first batch of data with a separate identification for yuan-denominated reserves will be published at the end of March 2017, said the IMF.