Claudia Buch: Welcome speech at the G20 Workshop on Data
Sharing
Welcome speech by Prof Claudia Buch, Deputy President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, at the
G20 Workshop on Data Sharing, Frankfurt am Main, 31 January 2017.
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Ladies and Gentlemen
A warm welcome to all of you participating in the G20 Workshop on Data Sharing. The workshop
is part of the second phase of the Data Gaps Initiative and co-organised by the IMF, Eurostat and
the Deutsche Bundesbank.
I am very happy to welcome participants from G20 and non-G20 countries, from international
organisations, central banks, statistical offices and finance ministries. Many of you have travelled
long distances, which shows how important data sharing is for our analytical work.
As you know, Germany fully supports the second phase of the G20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI-2)
and will fulfil all recommendations within the agreed timeframe (FSB and IMF 2016). The initiative
provides key statistical inputs for analysing the economy and financial stability. The initiative is
well on the way to realising its objectives within the envisaged five-year horizon. This has been
achieved through excellent cooperation between international agencies and G20 economies,
implementation of thematic workshops - like today's - and concrete timetables.
This workshop's topic is Recommendation #20 on promoting data sharing. We believe this
recommendation has a lot of potential. Aggregate datasets provide only limited information on the
drivers and effects of changing structures in the real economy and the financial sector. The
recommendation is therefore explicitly concerned with sharing of granular data. This is
necessary to understand global developments and in particular differences across countries.
Take the decline in cross-border banking activities since the global financial crisis as an
example. This development raises many questions:
Which banks have withdrawn from foreign markets?
Has the withdrawal been driven by regulation, by macroeconomic factors or by bank-specific
factors?
Are these patterns similar across countries?
What have been the effects on bank risk and lending?
These questions cannot be answered without combining datasets from different sources:
Bank income statements and balance sheets
Reports on external positions
International data
Combining datasets, looking beyond aggregate statistics into heterogeneous developments - all
this is required to transform "data" into "knowledge". Yet, legal constraints make it difficult, or
often practically impossible, to link micro datasets from different jurisdictions, even for research
and financial stability analysis. Better accessibility and sharing of granular data would open up
new possibilities for analysis by providing new insights into the effects of policies.
Let me give you an example. In order to analyse issues pertaining to global banks with granular
data, the International Banking Research Network was founded. This network brings together
researchers from around the world. They use micro-level data to better understand the
consequences of global banking: country teams work on the same topic in parallel, using their
distinct, bank-level data sets to help develop comparable cross-country evidence. Although the
underlying regulatory data cannot be made public, the results of the common analysis can be
shared to inform the policy dialogue.
One example is the latest research effort on the impact of changes in prudential policy
instruments on lending of global banks (Buch/Goldberg 2016 and Buch/Bussière/Goldberg 2016).
This project uses a new database that focuses on changes in the intensity of the usage of
several widely used prudential tools, taking into account both macroprudential and
microprudential objectives. It finds that international spillovers vary across prudential instruments
and are heterogeneous across banks. Bank-specific factors like balance sheet conditions and
business models drive, both the amplitude and direction of spillovers to lending growth rates.
Spillovers into lending growth from prudential tightening are positive in some cases, and negative
in others. Spillovers are most likely to occur via the affiliates of foreign banks hosted in a country,
although some evidence exists of inward transmission through home-country global banks. This
would be in line with an attempt of domestic banks to preserve market shares and to protect the
domestic market from international policy spillovers.
This example shows: The availability and flexible use of granular data early on is an integral part
of any structured process of policy evaluation. Other examples are easy to find: one can think of
information on channels of transmission of monetary policy across different institutions, sectoral
and firm-level drivers of productivity, the build-up of risks to financial stability and the causal
impact of regulatory and monetary policies.
To put it in a nutshell, we need to implement a new paradigm in statistics, moving away from
traditional, aggregate statistics towards the flexible use of (standardised) micro data. Micro data
are collected only once and can be used for multiple purposes, which has the added advantage
of a lower statistical reporting burden (Deutsche Bundesbank 2016). In order to develop this
benefit immediately, we need a close cooperation between bankers and statisticians.
We, therefore, welcome the work done so far. Let me name just a few milestones that have been
reached over the last year in the G20 context.
After the regional conferences, a Global Conference of the G20 Data Gaps Initiative was held
in Basel in June 2016. This conference agreed on concrete action plans for implementing
the DGI-2 recommendations.
The decision was taken to establish an informal G20 working group on data sharing, chaired
by the IMF and Eurostat in cooperation with the Deutsche Bundesbank.
Building on this, a meeting was held in Washington D.C. in November of last year to take
stock of G20 countries' experiences. First ideas were developed for a common terminology
for granular and micro data, and suggestions were made on how to balance confidentiality
and user needs in times of the internet.
All these elements built the basis for the draft recommendations on data sharing and
accessibility, which will be discussed in detail at this workshop.
This workshop offers the possibility for an in-depth discussion of the draft recommendations,
together with best practices. The final version should be agreed by the DGI contact group and the
IAG by the end of February 2017. This document will serve as a deliverable for the meeting of
the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in March 2017 to be reflected in the
Communiqué. Furthermore, the workshop should debate the next concrete steps to be taken
after adoption of this Communiqué.
I wish you fruitful and stimulating discussions and every success developing your ideas.
References:
Buch, C M, and L S Goldberg (2016), "Cross-Border Prudential Policy Spillovers: How Much?
How Important? Evidence from the International Banking Research Network", NBER Working
Paper no. 22874.
Buch, C M, M Bussière, and L S Goldberg (2016), "Prudential policies crossing borders:
Evidence from the International Banking Research Network", VOX, CEPR's Policy Portal, 09
December 2016.
Deutsche Bundesbank (2016), Microdata - paradigm shift in central banks' statistics, Annual
Report 2015, Frankfurt a.M., pp 47-59, February 2016.
Financial Stability Board (FSB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2016), The Financial
Crisis and Information Gaps, Second Phase of the G-20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI-2) - First
Progress Report, September 2016.