In this context, the Central Bank’s informing the public about the economic situation and risks, using various communication channels, must be viewed as a significant part of its independence. In the last four years, our Central Bank has experienced a historical transformation in terms of its communication policy. It all started with carrying out a new organizational arrangement within the Bank, founding a separate department. This department has the responsibility of preparing documents and booklets, and organizing meetings and conferences to explain monetary policy as well as improving the information set provided through the web page of the Bank. What we have achieved next was to elucidate the newly established conceptual framework of monetary policy. To this aim, we have tried to explain to the public concepts such as ‘inflation targeting’, ‘price stability’, ‘floating exchange rate regime’, ‘good governance’, and ‘sustainable growth’, standard elements of textbooks and generally known only in academic circles. To make economic agents familiar with these concepts, the communication policy of the Central Bank has effectively been used on every occasion through lectures and speeches across the country. Now, we know that these concepts are much better understood by the public. I truly believe that this good communication has played a very important role in the performance of the Central Bank in bringing down inflation. Dear Guests, Two important developments and their possible effects on the economy made us decide the year 2005 as a transition period and adopt full-fledged inflation targeting regime in 2006.

2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  At the regional level, the ASEAN Natural Disasters Research Works Sharing (“ANDREWS”) Committee has been formed to facilitate dialogue and information exchange between academia and insurance industry professionals on latest research and market developments relating to natural catastrophes. In Singapore, industry players have ramped up catastrophe analytics and modeling efforts rapidly in recent years. This is supported by scientific and state-of-the-art catastrophe risk research undertaken by research institutes such as the ICRM, the NUS Centre of Hazards Research and the Earth Observatory of Singapore. (iii)  Thirdly, a shortage of expertise to properly understand and assess catastrophe risks. Even where catastrophe models are employed, it is essential to overlay deep expertise and good judgment to challenge assumptions in modeling outputs, in order to have a more robust assessment and interpretation of the risks. The Thailand floods in 2011, for example, offered useful learning lessons about how there can be blind spots, without a deep understanding of the underlying risks: (a)  Thailand was not even designated by insurers as a catastrophe-prone prior to the floods, despite the potential risks and exposures;  (b)  Secondary losses arising from the business interruption claims were heavily underestimated; and  (c)  The accumulation of risks arising from Japanese cedants relocating their supply and production chains to Thailand from Japan, which had been hit with an earthquake and tsunami just months before, was generally overlooked.