Founded in 1973, BEAC manages currency, controls the supply of money, and implements monetary policy for its member states. Through its work, BEAC aims to achieve economic stability within its member states by ensuring that the economy grows whilst inflation is kept low and prices remain stable.
BEAC first began collaborating with Professor Olivier Menoukeu Pamen and the IFAM team on applied mathematical research which used predictive models and stochastic analysis to investigate whether BEAC’s main policy rates – the interest rate set by a central bank – are being set at the appropriate level to strike a balance between price stability and economic activity through the control of money supply and inflation.
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A major strand of BEAC’s partnership centres around researchers from IFAM delivering training to equip current and new BEAC staff members with cutting- edge knowledge and skills. This will create long-term benefits for the BEAC team, enabling BEAC staff to make robust and informed financial and economic decisions whilst helping BEAC create a critical mass of expertise within their organization through capacity building.
In the future, the IFAM team will use their research to investigate how actuarial science models can be used to help improve the performance of pension funds, as well as develop new models that can be used across the sub-region to rate commercial banks, thereby providing BEAC with the ability to better identify which are thriving and which are struggling. Once implemented, this work will have a lasting impact on how BEAC interacts with commercial banks across central Africa and will help improve credit rating at national and sub-regional levels.
IFAM and BEAC are also planning to work together on the implementation of novel sustainability stress tests to measure how banks can recover from a crisis using new mathematical tools that have been previously successfully applied by the IFAM team in other contexts.
Our partnership with IFAM will make a lasting impact across central Africa and beyond through the implementation of the mathematical models we are creating, as well as the education of young people across our sub-region who will go on to work in this industry for years to come.
DR EVRARD MOUNKALA, CENTRAL DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH STUDIES AND STATISTICS AT THE BANK OF CENTRAL AFRICAN STATES (BEAC)