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
Paulo Drummond assumed his role as the Director of the IMF-Middle East Center for Economics and Finance in April 2021. Before that, Paulo was a Division Chief in the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development (2020-2021). Previously, he was the Director for the French speaking IMF-Central Regional Technical Assistance in Africa (2016-2020). Prior to that, and during his long IMF career, Paulo was deputy chief of the division in charge of global technical assistance coordination in the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department (2015–16); deputy division chief in the IMF’s African Department (2009–15), and worked as an economist and senior economist in the IMF’s European Department (2000–2009). Paulo also served as IMF Resident Representative in Macedonia (1997–2000). His pre-IMF experience includes working at the private sector as an economic analyst for the holding company of the Bunge & Born group; as auditor for Coopers & Lybrand; and in banking with the Banco do Estado de Sao Paulo. Paulo, a national of Brazil, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
