Mauritius Becomes First African Country to Adopt IMF’s SDDS Plus Data Transparency Standard
Mauritius has become the first country in Africa to adhere to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Data Dissemination Standard Plus (SDDS Plus), marking a significant milestone in the country’s commitment to data transparency and economic reporting.
With this development, Mauritius becomes the 32nd country globally to meet the highest tier of the IMF’s Data Standards Initiatives, which sets the most rigorous benchmarks for the dissemination of key macroeconomic and financial statistics.
Adherence to the SDDS Plus means Mauritius will provide comprehensive and timely data on critical aspects of the economy and its financial sector linkages, strengthening transparency for policymakers, investors, and the international community.
According to the IMF, improved data transparency supports more efficient financial markets, enhances the quality of economic policymaking, and promotes stronger public accountability by enabling deeper and more informed analysis of economic policy issues.
Following the upgrade from the standard Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS), Mauritius will now disseminate additional datasets on a regular basis. These include the Other Financial Corporations Survey, Financial Soundness Indicators, the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey, and the Coordinated Direct Investment Survey, among others.
The country will also release more detailed and granular data for several categories already reported under the SDDS framework.
A full and updated description of all disseminated datasets is available on Mauritius’s National Summary Data Page (NSDP), which provides metadata within a standardized structure to support cross-country comparability and data quality assessment. The data series are also published in machine-readable formats to facilitate accessibility and analysis.
Welcoming the development, Bert Kroese, Chief Statistician and Data Officer and Director of the IMF’s Statistics Department, said Mauritius’s adherence to the SDDS Plus would strengthen macroeconomic and financial analysis and potentially enhance the country’s credibility in international capital markets.
“Mauritius’s adherence supports more robust macroeconomic and financial analysis and could reinforce its credibility in international capital markets,” he said, adding that he hopes the milestone will encourage more countries to transition to the SDDS Plus framework.
The IMF’s Data Standards Initiatives were introduced in the mid-1990s to promote data transparency and strengthen national statistical systems, particularly following financial crises during that period that highlighted significant information gaps in economic reporting.
In addition to the SDDS Plus, the IMF’s data transparency frameworks include the SDDS and the Enhanced General Data Dissemination System (e-GDDS), which guide member countries in improving the quality, coverage, and timeliness of their economic statistics.
Further details on the IMF’s Data Standards Initiatives and Mauritius’s SDDS Plus data— including advance release calendars—are available on the IMF’s Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB).
