Economics
A statement of all economic transactions between residents of a country and the rest of the world.
The compilation standard is the IMF’s Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual, now in its sixth edition. BPM6 “updates the fifth edition (BPM5) that was released in 1993”, and the IMF records that the update “was undertaken in close collaboration with the IMF Committee on Balance of Payments Statistics … and involved extensive consultations with national compilers, and regional and international agencies over many years.” The title carries a point often missed: the manual covers the international investment position as well as the balance of payments — a stock account alongside the flow account, which is why a country’s external position and its external flows are compiled together and should be read together. The page cited describes the manual rather than reproducing its definitions; the operative concepts are in the BPM6 text, which the IMF publishes in full.
What this source settles. Where a government or an intergovernmental body is cited, the page is authoritative for the regime it administers and for the figures it publishes about itself. Where a standards body is cited, the entry names the body and describes the standard’s role, but quotes nothing from a text that is sold rather than published. In every case the operative document — the Act, the order, the manual, the issue of the standard your contract names — governs over any summary of it.
From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).
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