Public demand has also stimulated the economy. Chart: Relative labour costs The Norwegian krone has depreciated markedly in the wake of the fall in oil prices and is now approximately 15 percent weaker than two years ago. The depreciation has led to a marked improvement in Norwegian firms’ cost competitiveness. The main responsibility for developments in relative wages lies with the social partners. If the improvement in competitiveness is to be sustained, Norwegian labour costs must develop more in line with the labour costs of our trading partners. This will make it easier to build up a larger non-oil tradable sector. The krone depreciation has helped start the restructuring process in the Norwegian economy. After a decade of higher growth in imports than mainland exports, export growth has recently outpaced import growth. The tourism industry is one of a number of industries experiencing an upswing. Many export firms have announced plans to increase investments in 2016, which will provide opportunities for an increase in production and market shares. Chart: Unemployment Employment in Norway has been high for many years. Compared with other countries, unemployment has been low. In the competition for labour resources, oil production and oil service companies have drawn the longest straw. The situation has now changed. Unemployment has increased over the past year. Regions with close links to the oil industry, 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  which have benefitted from the oil boom for many years, are being hit hard. Although employment continued to rise last year, employment growth has slowed.

One solution is to make the data reporting process better tailored to the needs of supervisors. Digital regulatory reporting (DRR) is the automation of regulatory data collection, and could potentially lead to significant improvements in both the cost and timeliness of data. The idea is based on machine readable reporting requirements that firms’ systems could automatically interpret and satisfy via a secure regulator-firm digital link. This would allow regulators to collect data on an ad hoc basis from firms as required, in close to real time without any manual intervention at either end. That would enable 6  Amadxarif, Z, Brookes, J., Garbarino, N., Patel, R., and Walczak, E (n.d) [forthcoming] 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  supervisors to specify the data they needed to solve a particular puzzle – exposures to a particular country, for example – and transmit that data request to firms in a machine readable form. The data would then be ‘grabbed’ directly from firms’ systems and sent back to supervisors automatically. The FCA and Bank of England are currently undertaking a DRR pilot with participants from a number of regulated firms. It is too early to say what the outcome of this early pilot will be, but initial findings suggest it is feasible. There remain significant technical challenges to be overcome. And regulators would need to guard against the moral hazard that could arise if firms perceived that responsibility for the accuracy and congruence of data had transferred from regulated entities to regulators.