Message from the Director
I am pleased to welcome you to the website of the IMF-Middle East Center for Economics and Finance (CEF). The IMF-CEF trains and advances leaders in each of the 22 Arab-League countries to raise the capacity and quality of economic policy making, with a view to ultimately raise the quality of life for people in the region.
The website presents to you our training program, courses delivered, ongoing events and economic resources that you may find useful. The design of our capacity development program responds to increased and evolving needs of our member countries and their sustained strong demand for economics training in a wide number of areas. Our training program encompasses a broad range of courses, covering macroeconomic, fiscal, financial, monetary, statistical, and legal topics, in addition to areas related to macroeconomics of climate change, gender, governance, and digital currencies—all of growing importance for the countries in the region.
Rapid advances in technology, significant policy challenges, the fluid global economic policy landscape, and downside risks underscore the increasingly important role and relevance of the CEF in building strong skills, with a view to help policymakers achieve their policy objectives.
The Center is fully hybrid-ready, and selected participants attend training in-person or virtually. The Center also allows great use of innovative delivery modalities tailored to country needs and peer-learning, which are essential for institutional transformation, offering and developing blended interactive and pre-recorded online courses which allow us to scale up access to training. Courses are conducted by IMF staff, consultants, and experts from other international organizations. The design of its well-rounded training program is done in close consultation with the Arab countries’ Directors of Training and the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department. Our program benefits from the collaboration with our long-time partners, including the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF), Bank Al-Maghrib (BAM), the IMF’s Middle East Regional Technical Assistance Center (METAC), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank (WB), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). We are grateful to the government of Kuwait for hosting the Center and the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) for their unwavering support.
We strive to continue building on our successes in recent years. In particular, the Center aims to continue expanding its curriculum, training an ever higher number of government officials, maintaining gender parity among participants, reaching out to our entire membership from across the region, and being a capacity development center of excellence for the region, always ensuring highly positive feedback on its operations. We look forward to your participation in our training activities and events and to seeing you during our in-person courses. We welcome your thoughts on the Center’s work through our website at www.cef.imf.org in English and Arabic or by email at cefmgmt@imf.org
Paulo Drummond
Director, IMF-Middle East Center for Economics and Finance
Mr. Paulo Drummond has been the Director of the IMF – Middle East Center for Economics and Finance since April 2021. He had been Division Chief in the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development, and Director of the French speaking IMF-Central Regional Technical Assistance Center. Prior to that, and since joining the Fund’s Economist Program in 1993, Mr. Drummond has worked in the IMF’s Strategy Policy and Review Department, on sovereign debt issues; in the European Department, on economic surveillance (Italy, Portugal, Hungary); in the African Department as mission chief on several financial programs; and in the Money and Capital Markets Department, coordinating the IMF’s global assistance on banking regulation and supervision. Earlier in his IMF career, he served as IMF Resident Representative in Macedonia. Prior to the IMF, Mr. Drummond worked in the private sector as an economist for the Bunge & Born group; for Coopers & Lybrand; and for the Banco do Estado de Sao Paulo. He has published widely in the areas of macroeconomics and finance. Mr. Drummond obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
