samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
While the deficit had been reduced from almost 10% of GDP in 2003 to 2.2% in 2007, it widened in the following two years and the latest projections, those of the EC, suggest that the shortfall will increase further to 4.3% this year, before declining to 3.6% in 2011. 9 These projections imply that the debt-to-GDP ratio in 2011 will stand at roughly the same level as in 2004, around 72%. These ratios are higher than those contained in the Government’s Stability Programme since the EC follows the “no policy change” rule and also because of differing macroeconomic assumptions. A credible fiscal consolidation strategy involves achieving a primary surplus that is sufficiently large to place the public debt on a stable, and eventually declining, path. For this purpose, additional measures beyond those announced in the latest Stability Programme would be required in order to comply with the recommendation under the Excessive Deficit Procedure to bring the deficit below 3% by next year. This accelerated consolidation is also necessary in view of the anticipated increase in spending on health care and pensions associated with an ageing population. Life expectancy in Malta in 2008 was 76 years and 81.1 years for men and women, respectively, and the population aged 65 or over as a proportion of the working age population is expected to rise progressively from 21.2% today to 59.1% in 2060. 10 Looking ahead, the ability of the economy to benefit from the incipient recovery in external demand through export growth hinges on its competitiveness.

4 The third source of resilience in the face of the global downturn was the ongoing diversification of the economy towards higher value-added services such as financial services and various business-related activities. The combined share of these services in total gross value-added has increased from 25% in 2004 to 35% in 2009. 5 Success has also been registered in attracting new manufacturing activities such as pharmaceuticals and aircraft maintenance, although these have not reversed the declining role of manufacturing, as traditional sectors like textiles and clothing continue to shrink in the face of competition from low-cost producers. 1  European Commission Malta: Macro Fiscal Assessment: An analysis of the February 2010 update of the Stability Programme, April 7, 2010, pages 6, 10. 2  For example, the voluntary redundancy schemes offered to the workers of Malta Shipyards Ltd.  3  Latest figure, for March 2010. 4  Flash Euro Barometer No. 271. 5  These services include NACE categories J (financial intermediation), K (real estate, renting and business activities) and O (other community, social and personal service activities). 2  BIS Review 73/2010  Finally, the provision of direct budgetary assistance to manufacturing companies that found themselves in difficulty helped to limit the impact of the weaker external demand on the labour market. This approach was deemed more appropriate than a broad-based fiscal expansion, which would have mostly leaked out through imports. This stimulus was complemented by the initiation of a number of infrastructure and environmental projects.
8.2 In the Sri Lankan context, the implementation of new and comprehensive IT systems is considered to be costly and the banks tend to compromise on the use of integrated solutions and advanced technology. Often, they prefer to adopt partial and ad hoc solutions, which may be less costly. Be it comprehensive or not, the primary objective should be to pass on the benefits of IT development to their customers by way of more efficient and speedier service at affordable costs. While some customers, the high networth customers in particular, do not consider the high cost of banking services as a deterrent, many medium and small scale businesses and individuals consider banking services to be unaffordable. In this scenario, some segments of the population would not reap benefits of the advancement of technology due to the denial of access to finance. There are many other areas where despite IT development in banking, the associated systems have not facilitated customer transactions at affordable costs. A classic example is the world-wide remittance flows. Due to the high cost of payments to banks, both at the capturing and the distribution points, nearly half of the world remittance flows are still in the hands of the informal systems like Hawala and Undial. Clients tend to move towards the informal financial sector, which is a form of financial exclusion.

Caleb M Fundanga: Financing for gender equality Opening remarks by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the official launch of the Financial Institutions exhibition in commemoration of International Women’s Day, Lusaka, 5 March 2008. * • • • • • • • •  *  *  The Honourable Minister for Gender and Women in Development The Country Coordinator of the United Nations System The Permanent Secretary, Gender in Development Division The Director, Environmental Council of Zambia Chief Executives of Financial Service Providers Heads of Non Governmental Organisations Invited Guests Ladies and Gentlemen  I am honoured this morning to address you at the launch of this important Financial Sector Exhibition by financial service providers, in commemoration of the International Women’s Day for 2008, under the theme “Financing for Gender Equality”. The purpose of this exhibition is for financial service providers to showcase how they are contributing to financing for gender equality. It also provides an opportunity for the various institutions to market financial products that can be accessed by women. A further objective is the sensitization of the financial service providers and indeed the public at large to the need for gender mainstreaming in access to finance. International Women’s Day began with the declaration of International Year for Women in 1975. Since then, many countries world-wide celebrate International Women’s Day to recognize the achievements of women without regard to national, ethnic, cultural, economic or political divisions.
This hybrid model for payments has lasted for many decades and it is the current  payment system we are all used to. And now ... what led central banks to reconsider this model is to get on the other side of your digital wallet, become your counterparty and offer you a new venue to access your money and a new form of public money – the CBDC. The motives are crucial here. But the motives differ from one country to another. MOTIVES Some central banks do it for inclusion, to attract people to the financial system, and to allow them to reap the benefits of legal protection - being protected and having access to financial services for everyone and from different places. Examples are developing economies like India or Nigeria. The others do it because of geographical reasons, or better to say, where geography is an obstacle for physical banking, such is the case for dispersed islands in the Bahamas and its cash-management problems. Transferring cash from one island to another is too expensive, and the common digital payment platform for citizens seemed like a viable solution. There are other reasons, such as serving as a backup option in case other payment solutions fail. For example, it is the case with Eastern Caribbean CBDC, which purports to support payments in the areas struck by volcanic eruptions in 2021. The others, like China, did it because of dominant technological platforms which exploited the network effects to stifle competition.

For example, suppose a CBDC or the digital euro is easily and widely accessible across borders or in countries facing financial instability. In such cases the citizens could substitute local currencies with the digital euro and make the domestic financial situation even worse. This is the scenario we must avoid. UNCERTAINTY Finally, we must all ask ourselves in what kind of financial reality we want to end up in because it could be a world of indirect currency competition pursued by private companies only as a matter of industrial and technological race. But, at the same time, we could end up in a world where payments are safe, easy to use and settled instantly - both domestic and international and with negligible costs. But will we end up in a world where our privacy is protected and our trust in the system is preserved in times of crisis? Are we going to put our trust solely in computers, protocols, artificially generated outcomes or centralized private companies' algorithms with a global reach? Or do we want public institutions to do their job, protect our interests when no one else will, and be there when we need them? CENTRAL BANKS - LEADERS OF CHANGE Our mandate is to continue to provide trust in money in the digital age. To be a vital part of this new digital world, a new reality. We must not stay aside and observe while the "The Times They Are A'Changin'" and external factors move our whole world in a strange direction.
Their conclusion is clear: “For debt-intolerant countries, sustaining access to capital markets can be problematic unless debt ratios are quickly brought down to safer levels. To assess how such ‘deleveraging’ might be accomplished, we examine how, historically, emerging market economies with substantial external debts have managed to work them down. To our knowledge, this is a phenomenon that has previously received very little, if any, attention. We analyze episodes of large debt reversals, where countries’ external debt fell by more than 25 percentage points of GNP over a three-year period. Of the twenty-two such reversals that we identify for a broad group of middle-income countries since 1970, two-thirds involved some form of default or restructuring. Only in one case – Swaziland in 1985 – was a country  1  Sources: World Bank, Moody’s and IMF (WEO, April 2012). 2  Reinhart, C., M. Savastano and K. Rogoff, (2003), “Debt Intolerance”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  able to bring down a high ratio of external debt to GNP solely as a result of rapid output growth.” Thus, in the early 2000s, there were widespread expectations that a default would occur. Overall, the history of Latin America in the 2000s did not go as expected. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Latin American countries succeeded in lowering their levels of external debt by nearly 20 percent of GDP.

This boost, which allowed the Chinese economy to deal quite successfully with the global financial crisis, brought about significant indebtedness of local governments, high exposure of the financial system to projects of dubious quality, and substantial over-investment. The need to put a stop to this impulse in order to safeguard macroeconomic stability has defined China’s economic policy decisions since 2010. Accordingly, the contractions in investment projects and credit availability have been the main stabilization tools used in China. However, this process coincided with the aggravation of problems in Europe, which resulted in a very sharp reduction of external demand for the Chinese economy, among other things. The fall in exports, together with the need to withdraw the stimulus that had been given to investment over the past few years, has put significant pressure on China’s growth. Its capacity to offset the drop in demand with increased domestic consumption is limited in the short run, especially since the necessary conditions to promote lower savings rates, such as changes to social security and health-care plans, a deepening of the household credit market, and changes in relative prices – such as a real exchange rate appreciation –, are often slow to implement. Until now the Chinese economy has continued to decelerate, and somewhat more rapidly than was foreseen a few quarters ago. In my view, China has the necessary tools to deal with this deceleration, and to deal with a possible worsening of problems in Europe.
It consequently proposed the use of external credit assessments, such as credit ratings, as a means for helping to assign risk weights, and hence capital charges, on claims. We were pleased that on the whole respondents agreed with the goal of increasing the sensitivity of the standardized approach to credit risk. Nonetheless, given the difficulty of achieving the right balance between sensitivity and simplicity, the proposal to base the standardized approach on external credit rating agencies’ ratings has raised real concerns. Some have noted that, especially in emerging market countries, very few borrowers have credit ratings, and the new framework might then not be able to differentiate credit risk substantially between borrowers. Some also raised questions about the performance record of some ratings agencies, particularly in the context of various regional financial crises around the world. Unfortunately, few alternatives were suggested during the comment period. Still, we remain open to fresh ideas and are working hard to address the concerns noted. For example, we are exploring the use of other indicators of a borrower’s credit quality to differentiate between risk exposures in a way that could be applied by any bank. Moreover, in response to suggestions made by commentators that the standardized approach could be expanded to allow for even greater risk differentiation, the Committee is actively evaluating whether it would be feasible to incorporate additional risk weights, particularly for corporate claims and the riskiest assets held by banks.

Caleb M Fundanga: Financial sector development in Zambia Remarks by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the farewell cocktail hosted in honour of the Barclays Bank Zamia Limited Managing Director, Lusaka, 4 February 2010. *  *  *  The Chairman – Barclays Bank Zambia Plc, Mr J J Sikazwe The Chairman – Bankers Association of Zambia, Mr Saviour Chibiya Chief Executive Officers of Commercial Banks Outgoing Barclays Southern Africa Regional Managing Director, Mr Zafar Masud Acting Barclays Bank Plc, Managing Director, Mr Bret Packard Management and Staff of Barclays Bank Zambia Plc Colleagues from Bank of Zambia Distinguished Guests Ladies and Gentlemen Ladies and gentlemen I am privileged to officiate at this farewell cocktail as we say goodbye to Mr. Zafar Masud who has been the Managing Director of Barclays Bank Zambia since January 2008. In the past few years, Barclays Bank Zambia Plc has contributed to making banking more accessible through its outreach programme which saw an increase in its ATM and branch network to over 150 ATMs and 55 distribution points comprising branches and agencies nationwide. Clearly the grass-root population in Zambia has continued to benefit from this initiative. As is the case with a number of other banks, Barclays Bank Zambia Plc has continued to innovate and positively contribute to financial sector development in Zambia.
You must aspire to grow from the informal to the formal and from SMEs to large corporations. You must not just wait for the targeted funds (which have a role to play) also seek to access other relevant products in the market. Seek to be informed. Make yourselves visible. Message for banks and other financial service providers •  Explore the women’s market segment as a viable and profitable segment;  •  Create innovate products that respond to the needs and wants of the women’s market segment;  •  Find new ways of mitigating risk;  •  Promote greater workplace diversity and promote more women into senior management positions; and  •  Assist women to be more financially literate. On our part, Bank of Zambia will continue to create an enabling environment through policies, legislation and regulation that facilitate greater financial inclusion of women. Chairperson, once again, allow me to applaud the sponsors, led by ZAFWIB, for successfully organizing this important event on the Month of the Woman Entrepreneur for the 8th consecutive year as well as for holding this year’s annual conference. As Bank of  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Zambia, we are delighted to play a positive role as it is a unique opportunity to build relationships amongst various stakeholders.

The simplified procedure or relaxed „KYC‟ note allows banks to use various forms of reference documentation such as community leaders other than the traditional approach used in the past. In addition, over the years, there have been a number of positive developments in the economy. Some of these include easier access to banking services through lower bank account opening balances; relaxed KYC procedures for opening and operating accounts; improved payments systems through mobile banking, e-money, increased numbers of ATMs and point of sale terminals, and improved access to foreign exchange through various bureau de change across the country. We have also seen a broader range of financial services, including products tailored for women. Under the second phase of the FSDP, Government is implementing a number of programmes, and building capacity for key stakeholders. Specific milestones include:  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  (i)  Development of a rural finance policy – a draft report has been developed and among others, focuses on proposals for developing warehouse certificate systems, supporting financial services providers towards rural banking as well as agency banking and initiatives for rural branch expansions (e.g. Natsave). (ii)  Establishment of development fund – DBZ is now the appointed apex body for wholesale funds and is also expected to launch an enterprise development fund co-financed with the Zambia Development Agency (ZDA).
Encik Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour: Sustainable development of affordable housing Keynote address by Mr Encik Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Dialogue on “Sustainable Development of Affordable Housing”, Kuala Lumpur, 4 July 2017. * * * I am sure many of us here can still remember when we set out to buy our first house, which may be between 20 to 30 years ago. Back then, a typical terrace house or a 3-bedroom apartment came at a price tag of between RM200,000 to RM300,000. The monthly repayment would be around RM1,200 to RM1,600. It was a big commitment. But it was manageable; it made financial sense, and it was affordable. That was many years ago. Those who are starting out today face much higher barriers to buying a house. The numbers speak for themselves. Lets take a widely used measure – the Median Multiple, for example. Under this measure, a house is considered affordable if the median house price is less than three times the median annual household income. For Malaysia, this ratio has consistently been above four since more than 10 years ago. In our major cities, the ratio can be as high as ten. Even if we look at other measures, the broad conclusion remains: housing in Malaysia is becoming less affordable. This dialogue on “Sustainable Development of Affordable Housing” is therefore very timely. Confucius once famously said that the strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

This reflects trends that point to smaller household sizes; the young moving out from family homes earlier, including to take jobs in urban cities; and an ageing population preferring to remain in their homes than move in with their adult children. Such demand pressures have been further compounded by income levels that have not increased in tandem with the increase in house prices. All told, the shortage in affordable housing based on 2014 data is estimated at 960,000 units. This could rise to one million units by 2020 if further measures are not taken to increase supply of affordable houses and improve affordability. Financing measures implemented by the Bank along with fiscal measures by the Government between 2010 and 2013 did in fact achieve this to a certain degree. House price growth has 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  since moderated to 5.5%, closer to income growth, following measures taken to dampen speculative activities in the housing market and manage high household debt levels. Lending standards that are more aligned with the level of income have also encouraged private developers to shift their focus to the more affordable segments which should help improve supply conditions. Approval rates for housing loans by the banking sector remain high at 74%, with more than 60% of the new housing loans extended for house purchases below RM500,000. Loan rejection rates for houses in the affordable segment have actually been on a declining trend, falling by 18% since 2012.
The model incorporates relationships for the demand and supply side of the economy. In addition, a relationship for interestrate setting is included. Within the framework of the model, we have sought to quantify uncertainty in key variables such as inflation, output, the interest rate and the exchange rate, based on the disturbances in the Norwegian economy in the period 1993-2005. Within the structure of the model, we have exposed the economy to similar disturbances ahead through Monte Carlo simulations of add factors. This gives an indication of uncertainty surrounding the different variables based on historical disturbances. Monetary policy responds to disturbances to the other variables. This increases uncertainty about the future interest rate, but at the same time reduces uncertainty in the other variables. In other words, there are strict, model-based technical assumptions behind the fan charts we use to illustrate uncertainty in our forecasts. It goes without saying that it is difficult to be very precise as to exactly how great the uncertainty will be. Nevertheless – in spite of these strict model-based technical assumptions – the fan charts illustrate an important point: that the forecasts are very uncertain. Norges Bank seeks to achieve an interest rate path that provides a reasonable balance between the objective of stabilising inflation at target and the objective of stabilising developments in output and employment. Monetary policy influences the economy with a lag; when the interest rate has been set, a period of time elapses before the effects on inflation and the real economy can be observed.

Rich countries can and will adjust more smoothly to these challenges, but it will be the poor in the developing world who are going to have to bear the heaviest burden. Naturally, changes in energy production and consumption as well as in energy markets structure have a special contribution to global action for coping with climate change. Second, surging energy demand worldwide makes us see the issues of energy security from a new perspective. A frantic search for energy sources by Asia's emerging economies, and the increasing concentration of production in the hands of sometimes unpredictable regimes, has deep ramifications for energy security in the advanced world, including and most notably in the European Union. Here, a forceful united approach is called for, based on integrated and well-functioning markets and European solidarity. Third, high and volatile energy prices constitute a challenge for macroeconomic management. Energy price developments have pushed up inflation in the advanced world with adverse effect on private demand and growth. On the other hand, windfall due to high energy prices poses challenges to fiscal, monetary and exchange rate management in the countries exporting energy. I am happy that the excellent list of speakers allows us to touch upon all these key challenges today. Ladies and gentlemen, before giving the floor to Mr. David Kotok from the Global Interdependence Center, the co-organizer of today's event, I would like to speak briefly about our cooperation with the Global Interdependence Center.