The crisis, for example, had a different impact on the Albanian economy, from what we had historically experienced. At the time, the Albanian economy did not seem to be vulnerable to the foreign sector. Subsequent analysis, however, showed that domestic imbalances had built and, indeed, made the economy vulnerable to a foreign credibility shock. It is crucial that research in central banks focus on available information and methodologies, which scrutinize existing paradigms, making this information useful to policymaking, before it becomes or leads to vulnerabilities. In light of the financial and human capital constraints faced by central banks in small, open economies, such as Albania, we believe that it is important for these topics to be discussed, in this workshop, with fellow researchers from academia and other central banks. I would like to encourage our researchers to publish their papers in relevant, peer-reviewed 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  journals as the most important certification of their work. This will make your research projects more useful and facilitate speedy implementation in mainstream policy making. Despite recent success in publications, one of the things that I hear the most is that there is not much research interest in the scientific study of small, developing or emerging market economies like Albania. From my prospective, I think that there is interest in the scientific study of small, developing or emerging market economies such as Albania, because of the particular and distinguishing characteristics of our economy, which can be different from those represented in mainstream research findings.

And this was an important reason why the Riksbank began to publish its forecasts and other material on which decisions were based early on in the new inflation-targeting regime. Building up confidence in the price stability target as quickly as we actually did would probably have been very difficult if we had not been as open as we were with regard to our work and our decisions. Secondly, openness and clarity are nowadays an important part of monetary policy in itself. According to economic theory, there is a correlation between interest rates with different times to maturity. And expectations of short-term interest rates, which the central bank governs, are important to the longterm interest rates. By influencing expectations of short-term interest rates, a central bank can therefore also indirectly affect interest rates with longer maturities. Greater influence over interestsetting for all maturities – the yield curve – means that the impact of monetary policy is more effective. This is often called conducting monetary policy by “management-of-expectations”. And the best way to do this is to provide good information. A third reason for working to achieve greater openness and clarity “outwards” is that it can help us to work more efficiently within the Riksbank’s walls. And this is an argument I do not think should be underestimated. Openness quite simply increases the incentives for us to do a good job as it makes it easier for others to evaluate how well monetary policy functions. 3  Sveriges Riksbank Act (1983:1385), Chapter 3, Article 3.