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External Sustainability of Oil-Producing Sub-Saharan African Countries / Misa Takebe and Robert C. York. IMF, 2011, 33 p. (WP/11/207)http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2011/wp11207.pdfIn the extensive empirical work carried out across the IMF on oil-producing sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, the notion of “sustainability” is often directed toward fiscal policies, and, in particular, views on the “optimal” non-oil primary fiscal deficit. The bulk of this work does not, however, address external sustainability, which is a concern especially forthose SSA oil producers operating under a fixed exchange rate regime. A couple of recent papers have extended the existing methodologies to assess external sustainability for some oil-producing countries but they do not focus on those in sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, we bolster this empirical work by providing a range of estimates for the long-run externalcurrent external account balance for each of the SSA oil-producing countries, based on three widely used methodologies in the IMF. Our research strategy is to apply these models to the eight countries in the subregion—Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, and the Republic of Congo—using similar simplifying assumptions so that we are using the same lens to view how they do and do not differ.