samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
That is shown by the blue line which is shooting up quite nicely. But crucially a recovery in the TFR will not have any perceptible impact on labour force and GDP growth until nearly 2040. This is shown by the yellow line. It will take time for the extra babies born in the next 15 years to start entering the labour force. So while it’s the most lasting solution to our challenges, TFR effects will only impact the economy in the long run. 6 / 17  BIS central bankers' speeches  The second way to soften the trilemma is to increase our resident Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR). This will have more immediate payoffs. But even at plausible stretch targets, its effects on resident labour force growth will be quite limited. Singapore’s LFPR – defined as share of the resident population aged 15-64 who are in the labour force – is currently 76.1. It is not bad by OECD standards but there is scope to improve it. Japan is at 76.8; Germany is at 77.9; the Netherlands is at 79.9; Sweden is at 82.1. Our LFPR for older workers is not bad; it is female LFPR where we are lagging behind. There is currently still a fairly large gender LFPR gap between male and females in their 40s and 50s. This gap in Singapore is higher than that in leading OECD countries. In many advanced economies, women tend to return to the work force after their prime child-bearing years.

London has averaged 3.3% annual growth since the financial crisis while Sydney has averaged around 2.9%. San Jose (which encompasses Silicon Valley) has averaged 2.7% p.a. It is hard to imagine a dynamic city growing at less than 2% or worse still, 1.5%. It will be unattractive to investors and talent, including the city’s own investors and talented people. A reasonably good rate of growth helps to create opportunities and preserve a sense of progress and hope, particularly among the young. It will also facilitate upward social mobility. 11 / 17  BIS central bankers' speeches  The experience of other leading cities suggests that demographics is not destiny. Yes, vibrant cities do attract people – and their additions to the labour force add to growth. But the main source of their growth and dynamism is not headcount but productivity. This is not an in-depth study but it appears that about two-thirds of overall GDP growth in the cities shown is due to productivity improvements. In comparison, productivity has accounted for about half of Singapore’s GDP growth. There is clearly scope for us to do better and thereby sustain our dynamism. How can we do this? 12 / 17  BIS central bankers' speeches  First, Singapore has scope to reap the human capital dividends that are arising from the continuous investments we have made in education and training in past decades. As recently as 2000, 45% of the resident workforce had below secondary school education, and only 12% had university education.
The first reform is to improve how we write our reporting instructions. We think we can make our instructions clearer and easier for recipients to work with, meaning smoother and quicker processing and less variability in how they are interpreted. The second reform is integrating various reporting processes – breaking down barriers between external and internal reporting, between different steps of the reporting process, and between different levels of data within the process. But third and most foundational is the wider development of common data standards. This underpins the other two reforms. And we believe it can help firms and other users make the best use of data, well beyond our collection processes. Common data standards  Let me first explain what I mean by common data standards. These are simply collectively adopted rules and methods for describing and recording data. They mean standardising the format and labelling used to identify and organise data.

Every year since then, as a savings plan, the government has let a substantial share of current income from oil and gas remain as deposits in the fund. At the end of the first quarter of this year, the fund’s market value stood at NOK 2 763 billion. See chart “The fund’s market value” at the end of the speech. As the fund increased, the need for a plan for the phasing in of oil revenues became evident. In 2001, the Government and the Storting adopted the fiscal rule, which is based on the deposit of government petroleum revenues in the oil fund. An amount equivalent to the expected real return on the fund, or 4 per cent, as an annual average over time, is transferred back to the central government budget to cover current expenditure. The transfers increase as the fund rises in value. Along the way, the name of the fund has been changed from the Government Petroleum Fund to the Government Pension fund Global. There are prospects that new annual transfers to the fund may be made over the next 10 years or so. This implies further growth in the fund, perhaps up to twice the size of today’s  3  See NOU (Official Norwegian Report) 1983:27 “Petroleumsvirksomhetens framtid” [The future of petroleum activity]. 2  BIS Review 78/2010  fund, which corresponds to one and half to two times annual GDP for Norway. Public expenditure accounts for about half of GDP.
It continually has to earn it. For this reason, in the run-up to the introduction of the euro, the Bank of England is playing a key role in preparing London’s global marketplace for this major new opportunity, alongside market practitioners themselves: We are ensuring that the necessary financial infrastructure in London is in place so that anyone who wishes to do so can trade and settle in euro in London from the first day of EMU. We are also helping to ensure that City firms whatever their nationality - are properly prepared so that they and their customers can make full use of the infrastructure. We are providing information to the London market so that firms - whatever their nationality - are as well informed as possible about the technical side of the preparations for the euro. This is the significance of our broadly quarterly series of publications on ‘Practical Issues’, which now has a circulation of around 40,000, of which 5,000 go directly overseas. We also aim to promote agreement between central banks and market practitioners across Europe on practical issues in areas where the market requires a degree of co-ordination. In conclusion, I want to emphasise three points. First, the introduction of the euro on 1 January 1999 will create a major currency for financing, with significant depth and liquidity. Second, London will be ready for the introduction of the euro. Anybody who wishes to do so will be able to trade and settle in euro in London from the first day of EMU.

The tests include cyclical convergence and structural flexibility, the impact on investment, the impact on the financial services industry and the impact more generally on growth, stability and jobs. So the UK will not join EMU at the outset. But financial firms in London, whatever their nationality, see the euro as a key part of their business. With our support at the Bank of England, they have been actively preparing for the introduction of the euro. London thrives on liquid markets, regardless of currency. So the introduction of the euro is a major opportunity for London. BIS Review 11/1998  -2-  From the start, London will act as a link between New York and the euro area by providing a full range of euro services in wholesale financial markets. That includes euro payments and settlement, so that anyone who wishes to do so will be able to trade and settle in euro in London from the first day of EMU. But it also extends to euro banking, foreign exchange and derivatives trading, bond and equity issuance and trading, fund management, financial advice and professional support services as well. The City of London is Europe’s leading financial centre and one of the top three global centres, alongside New York and Tokyo. Here in New York, the financial centre is influenced by the size of the domestic economy. That is true of Tokyo as well. But London’s success has historically been due to its international financial business.
These factors will become more acute in an increasingly complex and technologydriven financial system. Financial education has an important role in breaking such barriers. This will require more innovative approaches, broader partnerships and a deeper understanding of the social attitudes. Our own experience in Malaysia through the work of Bank Negara Malaysia and the Credit Counselling and Debt Management Agency (a subsidiary of the Bank) has shown that the impact of financial education strategies depends  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  on the ability to effectively combine broad-based and targeted strategies, and having a wellcoordinated approach that relies on multiple channels to reach different groups. Financial education is also a lifelong endeavour, from encouraging children to save their pocket money to helping adults attain financial security and independence for their old age. In supporting the inclusion agenda, financial education initiatives in Malaysia are designed as an important life skill, where consumers are exposed to knowledge on financial management during the different periods in their life. An increasing trend is for financial capability to be promoted from an early age through the integration of financial education into the formal school curriculum that covers basic money management, spending and savings, credit and debts, e-payments, financial risk management and consumer responsibilities. For the youth and adult segments of the population, Malaysia has also adopted a life event approach to the development and delivery of financial capability programmes.

Asia’s urban population has risen from 33% of total population in 1990 to 43% in 2010. The United Nations projects that Asia’s urbanisation rate would rise to 56% in 2030, and further to 64% in 2050. Accompanying this urbanisation has been the growth of mega-cities with populations exceeding 10 million. Twelve of the world’s 21 mega-cities are in Asia, including Tokyo, Delhi, Mumbai and Shanghai to name a few. Urbanisation has become particularly more pronounced in Malaysia during this period. The proportion of the Malaysian population living in urban areas has increased from less than 50 percent in 1990 to more than 70 percent in 2010, and is expected to rise further to 75 percent in 2020. The improved education and higher income levels that has come with urbanisation has enhanced opportunities for greater access to financial products and services. Indeed, financial institutions and markets have responded to the changing profile of financial consumers by offering a broader range of financial instruments and providing convenient access to meet the changing consumer preferences. It is recognised however that economic growth and development, no matter how stellar, will begin to fade when inequality sets in and when income disparities widen. Balanced growth is therefore an important imperative if socio-economic progress is to be achieved and if conditions that limit opportunities for employment and which deepen inequalities of income and wealth are to be avoided.
On the upside, there were price rises associated with the early supply- side disruptions and frictional costs of adjusting supply chains, that fortunately proved mostly transitory and “second order” in terms of contributions to overall inflation. But these cost-push factors could well rise again and thus bear close monitoring. 8. In the labour market, it is noteworthy that wages did not fall in several major economies. Wage growth was 4.8% in the US last year, 2.7% in the Eurozone, 4.3% in China, and 1.4% in Singapore. Part of this reflected some degree of nominal wage rigidity, induced by the roll-out of substantive wage subsidies meant to reduce the incidence of job separation in the initial stages of the crisis. Another statistical issue may have led to mismeasurement here. As a disproportionate number of lower wage workers became unemployed during the crisis, more so than during earlier downturns, compositional changes in employment would have led to overestimates of wage growth. The usual aggregate average wage series are typically not based on a fixed set of jobs or workers in continuous full-time employment. [1] 9. Second, at this stage, the risk of disinflation has receded as prices are oﬀ their local minima and underlying cost and consumer price pressures are picking up, though only gradually alongside the growth rebound. The IMF generally expects contained inflation pressures in most countries [2] . Higher commodity prices will mechanically raise consumer price indices in the short term.

These include the slope of the Phillips Curve, central bank’s policy responses together with the constraints imposed by elevated public debt levels, and importantly, agents’ expectations. Expectations in Macroeconomics 12. This brings me to my second set of comments. One of the truly revolutionary developments in macroeconomic analysis has been the recognition that expectations are central to the behaviour of agents. Most of us would probably reach back to at least Keynes’ General Theory, as marking its formal induction into general equilibrium macroeconomics. The theory and practice of macroeconomic expectations has evolved quite rapidly since then. In particular, Robert Shiller and George Akerlof were key figures in formalising the idea that changes in expectations may manifest as exogenous shocks rather than factor in endogenously as posited by the theory of rational expectations, thus giving analytical form to Keynes' “animal spirits” in macroeconomic research. [3] 13. More recently, Shiller and Akerlof have also led a revival in the interest of expectations in economics [4] . Placing a modern contextualisation to “animal spirits”, they describe it as “a restless and inconsistent element in the economy. It refers to our peculiar relationship with ambiguity or uncertainty. Sometimes we are paralyzed by it. Yet at other times it refreshes and energizes us, overcoming our fears and indecisions.” I think we can quite easily relate to such descriptions. We have seen the importance of expectations in determining aggregate outcomes during crisis, as well as in specific markets and cycles.
A bank may have an ownership share in and/or provide credit lines to both the lender and several other types of special purpose vehicles. If problems arise in one of more of the intermediaries, the responsibility easily falls on the bank. US and European banks have also invested in securities issued by special purpose vehicles. An important part of the process is the packaging of mortgages by special purpose vehicles. The senior tranches have a high rating. The subprime mortgage market has thus gained access to funding from insurance companies and other financial institutions that would not otherwise have invested in this market, and credit risk associated with these mortgages has been spread to international financial markets. 2  BIS Review 115/2007  Rising defaults on subprime mortgages resulted in a sharp rise in the yield spread between securities backed by this type of loan and US government bonds. The turmoil quickly spread to other financial market segments. Uncertainty arose in banks that were directly or indirectly exposed to losses on loans to subprime borrowers. Banks’ oversight of their own potential losses was poor. It was also unclear to what extent special purpose vehicles would draw on credit lines. A number of takeover companies, known as private equity companies, had difficulty obtaining financing in bond markets for their leveraged buy-outs. As a result, banks that had guaranteed temporary funding for these companies were left holding these loans for longer than originally planned.

Given what we have experienced in the last two years, it is my hope that the international community will see the wisdom of not waiting for the next crisis to learn how we can make the international financial system a more robust and safe one for all of us.” 3. Ladies and Gentlemen, I made the above remarks over 10 years ago, in June 1999. It was ten months after the Asian Financial Crisis hit Hong Kong, which was then followed by the turbulence of the global financial system as a result of the abrupt collapse of the LTCM. It was rather unfortunate that the fear I expressed in 1999 has come true ten years later. The international community has failed to learn the lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis and the LTCM debacle and to make the financial system more robust and safer. As a result, we have been punished, and punished very, very severely. The latest Financial Tsunami, dubbed as “Once in a Century”, has demonstrated that somehow all the key safety valves and gatekeepers have failed functioning properly to prevent excessive leverage and risktaking within the financial system, leading to very heavy fiscal and social costs in the subsequent bail-outs. 4. Now the international community, led by G20, is trying very hard to draw lessons from this latest financial crisis. I sense that there is a very strong resolve to do something this time round.
6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Changes in market prices can, of course, affect the value of the collateral the Bank has taken in its operations. As a result, the Bank calls margin on any shortfall.8 In its sterling operations, the Bank calls margin daily and is moving to that standard for all other transactions. Limits The Bank also manages the risk on its balance sheet using concentration limits. Those serve two purposes. First, they help the Bank diversify across institutions – for example, counterparties can only bid for a maximum of 30% of the funds on offer in the Bank’s ILTRs. That helps ensure that any single counterparty doesn’t corner the market for reserves (intentionally or by accident). Second, they help diversify across instruments in the wider collateral pool – for example, the Bank requires that the adjusted market value (AMV) of securities that any single issuer delivers to the Bank as wider collateral in OMOs is less than the greater of £ million or 25% of its total OMO collateral delivered. Other recent policy initiatives The Bank has, for a number of years, been refining and improving its collateral policy. In November 2010, the Bank announced that it would allow counterparties to use “raw” (i.e. unsecuritised) loans as collateral in the DWF. By removing the need to securitise assets, that initiative expands the range of collateral that banks would be able to use in times of stress.

These developments have spurred the necessity of our having to better understand and perform more analysis on banking risks. After all, banks do live and prosper by accepting risks, but these risks have to be managed with proper care. As we have all seen, well-managed banks have tended to stay resilient to the banking crisis and provided a backbone for restoration of financial stability. We must therefore, continuously adopt new techniques and technologies in risk analysis to ensure appropriate risk management of all financial institutions in the future. Of course, prevention is always better than the cure. As financial regulators, one of our main tasks is to provide a prudential framework ensuring the overall improvement of risk management of financial institutions. In the case of Thailand consolidated supervision as well as prompt corrective action will be introduced under the new Financial Institutions Act. Study is also on the way to prepare ourselves for the implementation of the BIS New Capital Regime, and we look forward to their conclusion for an explicit framework that will complement our current practices where we ask the Board to understand the nature of their organization’s business activities and risk appetite in order to provide an adequate internal control system to monitor and mitigate risks. Risk-based supervision represents yet another endeavor to tackle the effectiveness of risk management of financial institutions as transaction testing may no longer be an effective approach to examine the ever-more complex financial institutions of today.
On the one hand, the latest available version of the CBC’s survey of large-scale investment projects shows little change in the number and volume of projects committed for the next five years and a low inflow of new projects by historical standards, a trend that has been maintained for some quarters now. On the other hand, although imports of capital goods increased significantly in the first part of the year, the evolution of the stock market suggests a less optimistic outlook for the tradable component of investment going forward (Figure 15). Page 4 of 27  A core element in these projections is fiscal policy, which this year will add a significantly stronger impulse than we contemplated in March, considering the announcements already materialized and the additional spending that will trigger, among other measures, the recently approved household support initiatives. For 2022 and 2023, it is assumed that a massive fiscal impulse such as this one will not be maintained, giving way to policies focused on the most lagging segments and the stabilization of public finances. Thus, after reaching record expansiveness in 2021, the central scenario assumes that fiscal accounts will enter a path of convergence to structural targets and towards a sustainable public debt-to-GDP ratio, in line with the recommendations of the Autonomous Fiscal Council. This could be reinforced through permanent increases in tax revenues stemming from the reforms that have been recently announced by the Government.

This should be coupled with easier access to credit for productive enterprises - especially micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) – and reforms to foster technological change and productive diversification in line with the changing structure of the global economy. In the above recognition and its continued quest to contribute to unleashing the potential of local MSMEs, the Bank of Zambia hosted a strategic forum on the role of finance in this area, in June this year. As a follow-up, the Government is working closely with stakeholders and the cooperating partners in improving availability of financial resources to MSMEs. Further, some provision has been included in the 2013 Budget. Distinguished participants MSMEs could play an important role in creating employment and spurring growth. However, their competitiveness is undermined by inadequate infrastructure, limited access to financial and business services. Stakeholders can help small firms to integrate in, and reap more benefits from local and international value chains, by facilitating the provision of business services, among which continuous skills development is paramount. An important policy question is how to address the constraints which affect the capacity to grow and generate earnings of MSMEs, very often informal that operate in traditional sectors and account for the bulk of jobs in our country. This feat, ladies and gentlemen, can only be achieved gradually, as the drivers of informality are usually multiple and deeply rooted in long-standing development gaps and weaknesses.