samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Or we could think about the possibility of establishing “safe hubs” of granular information where data from different institutions are shared with every guarantee of retaining statistical secrecy and confidentiality. By way of example, in some Nordic countries there is a consortium of public institutions which share their data not only with their own analysts but also with the scientific community. It would also be worth strengthening the possibilities of having access to administrative registers of other institutions and to allow the matching of different databases. The value of micro datasets increases exponentially when they can be combined, including the granular information of one dataset in the observations of another. The amount of research  5  possibilities here is really huge. Therefore, we should make every effort to achieve these types of dataset combinations, through the above-mentioned “safe hubs”, through a consortium or by any other means. Another related issue is the importance of providing all the observations making up a given register. A large amount of observations is by itself important, as it allows the study of specific groups of agents with sufficient accuracy. But it is also crucial when it comes to merging different datasets. If an administrative register is reduced to some sub-set of observations, then the chances of finding the same agents in a different dataset decrease dramatically. This is of particular importance in the case of surveys containing important information to be merged with some registers. Surveys usually have a much smaller sample size.

Mohamed S Fofana: Banking developments in Sierra Leone Statement by Mr Mohamed S Fofana, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone, at the launching ceremony of the new Guaranty Trust Bank logo, Freetown, 28 July 2006. *  *  *  Mr Chairman, Hon Vice President, Solomon E Berewa, Hon Ministers, Board of Directors, Management and Staff of the Guaranty Trust Bank (SL) Ltd, Distinguished Ladies & Gentlemen I am pleased to be here with you this morning at the launching ceremony of the new logo of Guaranty Trust Bank (SL) Limited. We are all aware that change is inevitable in a dynamic world. And that change itself is dynamic, which is why we are all gathered here today. Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, a logo is a symbol or trademark designed for the clear and easy recognition of an institution by both its clients and its competitors. We in the Banking industry, as indeed the nation in general, have come to identify Guaranty Trust Bank with a particular logo in the recent past. The change from the old logo, which is two small squares flanking Guaranty Trust, to a new logo, which is a big orange square with a small white square at the top right side and GT Bank inscribed at the bottom of the orange square, is welcomed by the Bank of Sierra Leone.
In view of the important role of boards, and the work on governance under way, today we have published for consultation a Supervisory Statement on the responsibilities of boards. We recognise that this is a hugely important issue, and so we thought it was sensible to set out our thinking for comment as a precursor to a statement of our expectations. The statement clarifies our expectations of boards and indicates some of the elements of good governance to which we expect to pay particular attention in assessing how well firms are run. It draws on our regulatory experience and the lessons of past firm failures – including building society ones – and will help boards to understand how we reach our judgments on governance. The statement is not intended to be a comprehensive statement of good practice. Boards have other sources for that, such as the Corporate Governance Code produced by the Financial Reporting Council or the Basel Corporate Governance Principles for banks. The statement underscores the collective responsibilities shared by board members. As such it complements the individual accountabilities which we are introducing through the Senior Managers and Senior Insurance Managers Regimes. Under these regimes all senior managers, including certain non-executive directors, will be held to a clear standard of behaviour.

But the primary role of all NEDs is independent oversight and challenge of the Executive and the PRA recognises that the actual responsibilities of NEDs within the scope of the regimes differ from those of executive Senior Managers and they should be clarified and limited accordingly.
In this regard, the recent, widely different experiences of Ireland and Portugal are highly instructive. 1 Thus, whereas real per capita income in these two countries was not very different in the early 1990s, it had roughly doubled in Ireland by 2006 to 131% of the euro area average, but had only improved slightly in Portugal to 68%. How can such divergent performances be explained? Before joining the euro area Portugal pursued a pro-cyclical fiscal policy, which reinforced domestic demand, while in Ireland the fiscal stance was more disciplined. Whereas unit labour costs and inflation rose fast in Portugal, cost and price pressures were more contained in Ireland. As a result, competitiveness declined in Portugal, reflected in a growing current account deficit, whereas Ireland remained competitive and enjoyed a roughly balanced current account. These different policy approaches left their mark in the post-euro period. In Ireland, real output growth in the years 1999-2006 continued at a strong pace, 6.5% per year on average, and the fiscal balance was in slight surplus. In contrast, Portugal experienced an average growth rate of 1.7%, continued weak competitiveness and a substantial current account deficit. A major factor behind Ireland’s success was a 3% average annual increase in labour productivity growth, compared to less than 1% in Portugal. Another lesson that has emerged from the experience of these two countries, and is also widely documented in the literature, is that cost levels are not the only determinant of competitiveness.

Mohamed S Fofana: Tackling money laundering in Sierra Leone Statement by Mr Mohamed S Fofana, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone, at the official opening of the UNODC/GIABA/BSL training workshop on AML/CFT Strategy Development, Freetown, 10-13 July 2006. *  *  *  Distinguished Administrative Secretary of GIABA, Fellow Stakeholders, The Board and Management of the Bank of Sierra Leone, Participants, Distinguished Ladies & Gentlemen Let me on behalf of the Governor, Management and staff of the Bank of Sierra Leone welcome you all, especially those of you coming to Sierra Leone for the first time for this very important training workshop. May I also take this opportunity to congratulate you, Mr. Administrative Secretary of GIABA, on your recent appointment. I believe that your appointment is to underscore the fact that African problems require African solution. I also want to particularly welcome the facilitators from the UNODC and GIABA and proffer our gratitude to them for facilitating this workshop and for heeding to our call for help in the establishment of a Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). In the past, emphasis has been placed on the drugs trade as the principal source of cash that is laundered. We now know that other activities such as terrorism, tax evasion, arms trafficking, smuggling, human trafficking and advance fee fraud (aka 419) are veritable fountains of cash for money laundering.
8  While actions that increase bank reserves do not necessarily increase bank assets, evidence suggests that for LSAPs conducted through 2012:Q3, assets were ultimately sourced primarily from non-banks – households (including hedge funds), broker-dealers, and insurance companies. All else equal, this would imply that the purchases increased bank assets. See Carpenter, Demiralp, Ihrig, and Klee (2013). Even if bank assets do not increase, an increase in reserves could create distortions that raise balance sheet costs. This could happen if banks shift the composition of their assets to accommodate the increase in reserves, and in doing so are pushed away from their optimal balance sheet composition. 9  These other tools include the Term Deposit Facility, term RRPs, and asset sales, each of which would have the effect of reducing the amount of reserves held by banks. Money market rates would rise as reserves were made scarcer through the use of these tools. See Martin, McAndrews, Palida, and Skeie (2013) for a theoretical exploration. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  strengthening the bargaining position of non-bank lenders. Moreover, by reducing the amount of reserves held by banks, ON RRPs may directly reduce the level of bank assets and thus balance sheet costs. 10 If ON RRPs are offered at a fixed rate below the level of market rates that would be produced by IOER alone given prevailing frictions, the ON RRPs should not be an attractive investment option in normal times. As a result, their availability should have little effect on market rates.

A key question for the future is this: do notification and memo-posting suffice, so that funds actually move at discrete times in the day, as they do in the UK, or do funds need to move in near real time as well? 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  In the near term, we in the Federal Reserve continue to work to reduce the time required to complete payments and deliver payments-related information in the channels in which the Fed operates. The debate to be had by the industry is whether our existing payments mechanisms can meet the needs of the future or we need to embark upon designing a next generation payment instrument. We welcome your voice in that debate. Let’s turn our focus to end-to-end efficiency in the payments system. Innovation is occurring in closer proximity to end-users, at points between payment providers and their customers, and between merchants and consumers. Enhancing efficiency will mean moving business-tobusiness (B2B) and person-to-person (P2P) payments from paper to electronics, and bringing down the end-to-end cost of initiating and receiving payments. Efforts will continue by Internet/Web vendors to create customer-facing technologies to help users initiate payments. Here’s where mobile and handheld innovations may play a large role. In what form, and when, growth occurs will depend on when alternatives offer the speed, convenience, simplicity and other advantages that drive broad adoption.
A fixed exchange rate means that the central bank, with the aid of currency market interventions or its policy rate, stabilises the exchange rate around a target, e.g. a price for the dollar, gold or an average of currencies, whereas under a floating exchange rate regime the exchange rate is determined by supply and demand in the currency market. With a fixed exchange rate, you avoid some of the uncertainty in world trade when countries exchange currencies with each other. There is a limit to how much a currency’s exchange rate can vary, which is good for importers and exporters when they are forecasting income and expenditure. The fixed exchange rate can also be seen as a way to achieve price stability. With a fixed exchange rate, inflation in the long term cannot be higher or lower than the inflation rates in the countries with which you have tied your exchange rate. For example, a fixed exchange rate against the dollar would ”force” us to maintain the same inflation rate in the long run as the US and the other countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar. Were that to fail, our current account balance would deteriorate and we would have to devalue. BIS Review 84/2005  1  Sweden devalued five times between 1976 and 1982 under a fixed exchange rate (1976, twice in 1977, 1981 and 1982). That was because Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s had higher inflation than the other countries.

Gross National Product grew by 8.8 percent in real terms in the second quarter of 2006; and the growth rate decreased to 3 percent in the third quarter due to the monetary tightening and the fluctuations in the financial markets in June and July. Therefore, accumulated real growth has been 41 percent and the average growth rate has been 7.6 percent as of 2001. Looking at the possible short-term outlook of growth before moving on to the evaluation of the process of structural change in the dynamics of the growth in the Turkish economy, I wish to emphasize that the slowdown observed in the economic activities in the third quarter of 2006 does not necessarily mean that a stagnation will be experienced in the last quarter of 2006 or after that. Considering these, we foresee that the growth rate in the last quarter of 2006 may remain at a low level due to the basis effect created by high growth rate in 2005. However, the annual growth rate of 2006 may realize around 5 percent in accordance with the program. In the light of the current information, we foresee that the annual growth rates will start increasing again as of the second half of 2007. The Turkish economy has recorded remarkable improvements towards overcoming the period of fluctuating growth rates thanks to the macroeconomic stability environment established in the last five years. The determining factors in growth rates have been the private sector consumption and investments.
The stock of British foreign investments in Albania shows low rates, whereas the impact of emigration and remittances indicators is somewhat higher, but still a non-determinant factor. On the other hand, indirect effects would depend on Brexit’s impact on the European economy and banking system. Brexit may also translate into institutional developments that will affect the rules of European economic and financial market development, as well as European integration processes. In other words, implications for Albania and the region potentially exist, but still remain difficult to identify. I would rather not dwell very long on this topic; however, I do believe that today’s discussions will help us understand these processes and assess in advance the potential political and economic implications and consequences for our countries. I would like to stress that all of us in the Western Balkans remain hopeful that Brexit will not generate centrifugal forces, which harm our European integration processes, initiate setting barriers to free trade and movement of people, and encourage further fragmentation of the European financial system. 3. Monetary policy and financial stability in the post-Brexit period The coordination of the monetary policy with the necessary measures for safeguarding financial stability remains a challenging issue for policy makers even in better days. The challenges to this coordination may only strengthen, if Brexit implications assume the negative dimensions listed above.

It is important that macroeconomic imbalances should be avoided and that a critical mass of structural reforms should support a sustainable growth path. This lesson holds particularly true for the emerging economies. Over the past several years, I have repeatedly pointed out in my speeches that convergence with the EU along with maintaining macroeconomic stability is the major challenge facing Romania. In recent years, fast-track economic growth drew on external saving. Banks became dependent on external financing and the current account deficit exceeded the sustainability limits, which caused the Romanian economy to grow vulnerable. The global crisis fostered this vulnerability which translated into a marked economic slowdown. Today it has become clear that the natural bias towards speeding up real convergence needs to be balanced by the need to ensure a sustainable convergence process. The NBR has repeatedly warned against the pro-cyclical nature of the fiscal policy, which added to excess demand. We should learn the lesson that allowing wide budget  4  BIS Review 56/2009  deficits while the economy is expanding ends in failure. It would have been much easier today for us to find the means to weather the crisis if our budget had been on a surplus over a two-year period prior to the unleashing of the crisis. 9. The adoption of the euro cannot be a substitute for the need of domestic policy adjustment. This lesson became clearer at the moment emerging economies were hit by the economic crisis.
If anything, the importance of the Bank’s independence, which is already enshrined in Maltese law and has been duly respected by successive governments, will be even greater once the Bank becomes a member of the Eurosystem. First of all, the autonomy of national central banks is mandated by the Maastricht Treaty. Reflecting this requirement, the Central Bank of Malta Act now fully guarantees the institutional, functional, financial and personal independence of the Bank and of the members of its decision-making bodies. As for the ECB, it has adopted low inflation as its overriding objective, and its independence helps to guarantee its ability to deliver on this commitment. As I said earlier, the governors who sit on the Governing Council of the ECB do so in a personal capacity and must be guided only by euro-area wide considerations. As members of this Council, therefore, governors of national central banks must not only be persons of recognized professional competence and personal integrity, but they must also be prepared to defend their own bank’s as well as the ECB’s ability to act independently of political and other pressures. 4  BIS Review 59/2007

The private sector should establish medium and long-term strategies, prepare more transparent balance sheets, give importance to modern risk management principles and pay attention to research and development activities in line with corporate governance. The public sector should assume a supervisory and regulatory role within the scope of the principles of good governance and work towards creating an atmosphere in which the unregistered economic activities and unfair competition are eliminated and thus the private sector can compete in international markets as equal partners. It is also worth to note that the sequence and prioritisation of reforms are also important. That is to say, one should bear in mind that achieving the best practice on governance in this dynamic economic environment requires a carefully planned long-term reform process. Finally, I would like once more to remind you that the prerequisite of reaping the benefits of good governance is to maintain macroeconomic stability. That’s why, in every step that we will take in the future, we have to be sure to avoid jeopardizing the macroeconomic stability that we have achieved so far. Distinguished guests, Good governance principles serve as a blueprint for decision makers both at the economy-wide and firm specific levels to cope with the changing economic environment and the uncertainty that comes with it. As of today, Turkey is in a position to focus on structural and micro reforms and to improve its own governance structure in line with the European Union membership perspective.
The HKMA therefore expects that the security aspects of the system will have been reviewed by qualified independent experts and that the risk management systems and internal controls will be reviewed and evaluated on a regular basis e.g. by external or internal auditors. We also discuss with the banks their approach to the other types of risk described earlier, with particular focus on how the risks from the internet banking service are shared between the bank and its customers. Apart from these general considerations, a number of specific issues arise in relation to internet banking. The first is how we would treat the pure internet bank, i.e. a “virtual bank” that delivers its services entirely over the internet. If such a bank wished to be authorised to take deposits in Hong Kong, it could not be allowed to exist wholly in cyberspace. It would need to have a physical establishment here, either as a locally incorporated bank or as a branch of a foreign bank. This would be necessary to provide a point of contact with the bank in Hong Kong for both customers and the HKMA. In particular, we would require books and records to be held in Hong Kong which we could inspect. Also, like any other bank, a virtual bank would have a balance sheet and would need to hold capital and liquidity against the risks in that balance sheet.

This competition can be launched across national frontiers. In the meantime, existing players are faced with the problem of what they do with the branch networks they have so painstakingly built up over the years. Unless they can give the right incentives to existing customers to migrate to the new electronic delivery channels, and scale back their branch networks accordingly, the promised cost-savings from the internet may not be realised. Moreover, one of the key distinguishing characteristics of the internet is the ability which it gives customers to access and compare the offers of many different retailers, including banks. This greatly increases the power to “shop around”. This will increasingly be done with the help of automatic shopping agents that will travel the net looking for the best deal on behalf of customers or through the use of intermediaries who will offer consolidated product information and price quotes. This will drive down margins, particularly on commodity-type products, and erode customer loyalty. As has often been said, the Internet Age is all about customer empowerment. What in this situation is a traditional bank to do? Is it simply a matter of waiting to be overtaken by a trendy new virtual bank with a catchy name? Luckily, for the existing players it is not as simple as that. Banking is not simply about cheap delivery, although that will become more and more important.