samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The decline in oil prices partly reflects large oil supply surpluses and lower demand for oil in China and other emerging economies experiencing weaker growth. The effects of the fall in oil prices on the Norwegian economy gradually became evident through 2015 and were particularly pronounced in regions and sectors closely linked to the oil industry. Chart: Petroleum investment The most direct channel through which the fall in oil prices is transmitted to the economy is via the supply of intermediate goods and services to the petroleum industry. Oil companies have postponed or cancelled a number of development projects on the Norwegian continental shelf as a result of the decline in oil prices and have implemented a range of measures to reduce operating and maintenance costs. Total petroleum investment fell by 15 percent between 2014 and 2015. At the same time, lower demand from the global petroleum industry has led to a decline in Norwegian oil service exports. The decrease in activity in the oil industry is having spillover effects on the wider mainland economy. The effects are most pronounced in industries providing goods and services directly to oil companies, but are also clearly evident in a number of other industries. Mainland business investment also showed a fall in 2015, driven by a weaker growth outlook and uncertainty surrounding economic developments. Growth in household consumption has nonetheless remained fairly firm. House prices and housing investment have continued to rise, although the fall in oil prices has had a dampening effect in some areas of the country.

In Germany, as in other euro are countries, there were and are forces in disagreement with the Monetary Union, analysts and economic agents who considered the break-up of the euro as likely. But what counts is what the German Government’s position was and its support, at key moments, to save the Monetary Union and the euro, its support to the programmes for stressed countries and the Banking Union process. Rather, we can say that the new hegemon is the culture of monetary and fiscal stability that has gained in strength over the course of the crisis. The strengthening of the institutions and of the rules to ensure fiscal stability is essential for maintaining the stability of the Monetary Union and of the euro. This is because, as we all know, the source of the Monetary Union crisis lay basically in certain countries’ fiscal performance, even more so than in the banking crisis which has also affected – to differing degrees of intensity – virtually all the euro area members. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Convergence Programs of the new Member States should include ambitious Medium Term Objectives to ensure that not only the Maastricht criteria are met, but most importantly, the emergence of excessive deficit situations is avoided and the risks of taking recourse to exchange rate adjustments after joining the ERM2 (and, eventually, the euro area) are minimized. The well functioning single market for all goods and services, including infrastructure networks, as well as pursuing the National Reform Programmes in the context of the reinforced Lisbon agenda is the other pillar for the success of the euro area and for the new Member States in particular. Estonia has been a de facto member of the euro area since the inception of its independent currency in 1992. Fixing the local currency to D-mark, and later to the euro meant that the monetary policy decisions were not made in Estonia. Estonia's currency board regime implies prudent fiscal stance that has been largely adhered to since 1992, resulting in our general government having accumulated a relatively large net asset position of around 10 percent of GDP. A solid budgetary position and early deregulation of product and capital markets implies that Estonia has been well placed to absorb both positive and negative shocks during the last 15 years. Deregulation and reform in preparation of the EU membership has allowed us to fully integrate our economic and financial systems with the Single Market. However, that kind of approach requires, in today's conjuncture, forward-looking structural reforms in almost all EU member states, e.g.

But we did not pursue this policy with the ultimate goal of reconstructing banks’ profitability. Rather, the purpose of our enhanced credit support has been to ensure the transmission of monetary policy transactions to the broader economy. Global economic governance The crisis has important implications for economic governance, and here remarkable efforts have been made or are under way. On the global level, the G20 has become the main forum for international cooperation, and a strong consensus has emerged within this group not only  2  BIS Review 59/2010  about the causes of the crisis but also about the appropriate policy responses. The G20 has been highly effective in addressing the global crisis. The more technical questions concerning regulation and financial stability are mainly delegated to the Financial Stability Board (FSB). The extension of both the membership and the range of tasks of the previous Financial Stability Forum have pushed the Financial Stability Board into a leading role when it comes to coordinating the reform of financial regulation. The European regulatory response to the crisis will include a new body that will provide macroprudential oversight and focus on the avoidance of systemic risk in the financial system of the European Union as a whole. This is the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB), the establishment of which intends to make macro-prudential oversight operational at the European level.
STAGE 3 – TWO-WAY INTERACTION The publicly accessible website offers the possibility of an electronic intake with an official electronic form to start the procedure to obtain this service. This implies that there must be a form of authentication of the person requesting the services (75% – 99% in the figure). Stage 4 – Full electronic case handling: The publicly accessible website offers the possibility to completely treat the public service via the website, including decision and delivery. No other formal procedure is necessary for the applicant via "paperwork" (100% in the figure). More information available in Online Availability of Public Services: How is Europe Progressing? Web Based Survey on Electronic Public Services. Report of the Fifth Measurement, Capgemini for European Commission, October 2004. BIS Review 90/2006  7

In  3/7  addition, the number of bank branches has declined by 43%, while the number of Spanish banks1 has fallen from 122 at the start of the crisis to 61 in 2018. Also, all the former savings banks, apart from two, have been transformed into commercial banks, and most of the mergers and takeovers that have taken place have given rise to healthier institutions and have resulted in significant cost savings. The FROB, for its part, has played a prominent role in promoting some of these consolidation processes. These efforts to correct the excessive size of the sector were also accompanied by a significant balance sheet clean-up. As we all know, the financial crisis caused the quality of Spanish bank assets to deteriorate significantly. Indeed, in just five years the nonperforming loan ratio reached unprecedented levels (of around 14% at the end of 2013) and foreclosures rose to over € billion in 2014. The decline in the return on assets and the increase in net provisions for bad debts caused the banking industry as a whole to post a loss in 2012. This weakened bank solvency and, moreover, led to significant capital requirements for some banks, to the extent that public support was necessary to cover the capital shortfalls identified and to guarantee financial stability and, ultimately, the deposits of the general public. The FROB was once again fundamental in this area since, along with the deposit guarantee scheme, it injected around € billion of capital into the system.
So far, 21 APG Typologies Workshops have been held since the APG’s formation in 1997, where the last Workshop was held in 2018, jointly with the Eurasian Group on Combating Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (EAG) in Russia. These Workshops have contributed to a better comprehension of prevalent money laundering and terrorism financing (ML/TF) threats in the region, by allowing members to understand latest trends, identify key red flags as well as sharing of information on possible counter-measures to respond to the threats. This has assisted members to take the hard decisions to prioritise, apply resources and put in place systems to effectively tackle financial crimes. With so much benefits, the APG is committed to continue holding the Annual Typologies Workshop so that members could keep abreast with the latest ML/TF trends and typologies. As you can see in the agenda, this year’s Workshop aims to discuss two key areas that were approved by the membership earlier. These two topics namely, Digital ID/e-KYC and Financing and Facilitation of Foreign Terrorist Fighters, are timely given the current development in our region. Allow me to touch briefly on these two topics. Digital ID/e-KYC The rapid technology advancement in the last decade has led to significant innovations in the financial sector. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated the need for financial institutions around the world to shift their operations onto the digitalised platforms. Digital ID/e-KYC is one such innovation and the authorities have responded accordingly.

Michael C Bonello: Central bankers’ view of the new challenges Speech by Mr Michael C Bonello, Governor of the Central Bank of Malta, at a conference entitled “The Challenges for Central Banks in an Enlarged EMU” organised jointly by the European Community Studies Association (ECSA Austria), Research Institute for European Affairs (IEF) and Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Vienna, 20-21 February 2004. Mr Bonello was a panelist on the discussion regarding “Central Bankers’ View of the New Challenges”. *  *  *  When ten countries, including Malta, join the European Union (EU) on 1st May, they will assume the status of “Member States with a derogation”, meaning that they are exempt from the stricter rules of EMU. This may seem to imply that the transition to EMU is thereby rendered easier, but a careful examination of the conditions attached to the process reveals that the policy issues involved are anything but straightforward. This is particularly true of a small open economy like Malta’s in which macroeconomic policy is strongly conditioned by the external environment, but which has nevertheless succeeding in reconciling a hard currency peg with relative exchange rate stability for over thirty years. Malta has a population of only 400,000. Its nominal GDP of € billion, or less than 0.1% of that of the EU, translates into a per capita income which is around 69% of the EU average. Market services, including tourism and finance, account for nearly two-fifths of GDP, while manufacturing contributes almost a quarter.
Trend 2: Leveraging Technology Developments and Innovations 17 Đ Đ The second trend relates to technology.Đ Technology is widely viewed as having the potential to be a significant disrupter to financial markets globally, whilst owering tremendous opportunities, including changing traditional ways of doing business, lowering operating costs and enhancing productivity. 18 Đ Đ In its current form, securities trading and clearing involve many stakeholders from exchanges, clearing houses, broker-dealers, and agent banks, which adds to frictional costs and lowers the ewiciency of trading and clearing. Exchanges have shown growing interest in technologies like distributed ledger technology (“DLT”) to develop solutions that could simplify and speed up some of these processes. • Many of you have made significant headway in deploying technology in multiple ways.Đ A 2018 report commissioned by Nasdaq [8] found that 70% of stock exchange operators surveyed were working on pilot projects to deploy DLT. This includes exchanges from the US, Europe, Australia, and Singapore. • In Singapore, SGX and MAS successfully developed Delivery vs Payment (DvP) capabilities for the settlement of tokenised assets across diwerent blockchain platforms last year. This can simplify post-trade processes and shorten the settlement cycle. Australia’s stock exchange, the ASX, is also using blockchain to replace its post-trade clearing and settlement platform.

Since August, inflation has fallen back to target (for the first time in 5 years) and unemployment has fallen rapidly towards 7%, so what have we learned on the journey towards our threshold? With the wisdom of hindsight, there have been three main drivers of the recovery thus far: a marked reduction in extreme uncertainty, the repair of the core of the financial system and significant deleveraging by households. These have driven a recovery in consumer spending and housing investment, which together have accounted for almost all the GDP growth in the year to Q3. As my colleague Ian McCafferty outlined earlier this week, there are also early signs of a recovery in business investment. The less good news is that the recovery has not – as measured at least – been accompanied by meaningful productivity growth. Given the continued openness of the economy and the credibility of macro policy, it is hard to think of any reason why there should have been a persistent deterioration the UK’s  1  My MPC colleague Ben Broadbent discussed these issues extensively in September 2013 in a speech at the London Business School, “Conditional guidance as a response to supply uncertainty”. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  productivity performance. In fact there are several reasons to expect productivity growth to pick up as the recovery proceeds. For example, until recently, the fragility of the banking system limited the reallocation of capital and labour from less to more productive activities.
23  See, for example, Carney, M (2014), “The future of financial reform”, speech delivered at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Inflation  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Report. See  also  http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/fischer  5  Over the medium term, financial reform will change the nature of this cycle. Once implemented, measures to end Too-Big-To-Fail should reduce the risk of extreme spillovers from failures of systemically important firms. Measures such as leverage ratios, higher capital charges on trading books, minimum haircuts for repo transactions, central clearing of standardised derivatives should all dampen endogenous credit creation at the core of the system and thereby limit the amplitude of the global financial cycle. Indeed, the dog that hasn’t barked in the wake of recent market turbulence has been any hint of distress at any major financial institution. On the other hand, while the core of the system is more secure, the system as a whole is less able to provide on-demand liquidity. This reflects the impact of regulatory changes and changes to market structures, including the rise of algorithmic trading and the increased importance of asset management. Over time the Bank of England expects high liquidity premia to persist in normal market conditions to compensate for these developments. 24 The final important global financial linkage is the level of long-term risk-free interest rates determined in global capital markets.

The development of renminbi business in Hong Kong, and more generally the role of Hong Kong in serving the need of China in international finance depend on the pace of financial liberalisation on the Mainland. It is therefore very much out of our hands, involving policies that allow for greater cross border mobility of capital, financial instruments and financial intermediaries. Yet our survival as an international financial centre depends on our being prepared for these policies of financial liberalisation. We should also be proactive in offering advice in policy making and be ready to provide assistance and technical support in policy implementation. One very practical way of doing this is to continue to use our financial system as a platform for cautious experiment in the gradual liberalisation of the renmminbi – a process that is of benefit to our system and to the nation as a whole. The Basic Law specifies that Hong Kong's status as an international financial centre will be maintained. There are many policies and programmes in train to achieve this. But surely the key for the future is in developing Hong Kong as the offshore renminbi market. There should be no doubt that the renminbi will become an international currency one day. For Hong Kong to be unprepared for this, for us to fail to see the opportunities or build the infrastructure to make the best of it, would be to risk marginalisation.
And, at the same time, the launch of the programme of public guarantees to loans extended by financial institutions for a very sizeable amount is a most powerful lever enabling firms to finance their liquidity needs. This programme limits 21  the risk of firms disappearing and therefore preserves the productive system for the time at which the restrictions on activity imposed as a result of the pandemic are lifted. The data I shall later offer underscore the importance of these programmes of public guarantees to loans granted by financial institutions to firms, and particularly to SMEs, for the purpose of preserving the business sector and employment in the economy. It is highly likely that the interruption of activity, either completely or partly through the setting of maximum permitted numbers, will most sharply affect the tourism and leisurerelated sectors. In this respect, a temporary extension of the mechanisms implemented to date to provide liquidity to firms in those sectors that will be affected by the crisis over a longer period would seem desirable. Generally, the pace of the return to normality will evidently differ across the different productive sectors and firms. Accordingly, the fiscal policy response should also be tailored to these circumstances, with the dual aim of preserving that part of the productive system most affected by the crisis and containing the impact of these measures on public finances.

At the start of my testimony, I stressed that the key objective of economic policy at the current stage of the crisis must be to ensure the most favourable conditions possible for when the economy emerges from lockdown. However, more persistent adverse effects on certain sectors after the pandemic has been brought under control cannot be ruled out, although it is undoubtedly too early to anticipate how extensive they will be, or which activities will bear the brunt of the impact. Further, certain tentative indications suggest that, in the long term, demand could fall in some sectors, such as retail trade, and increase in others, such as logistics, technology, and IT systems. In view of this possibility, it would seem advisable to make the relevant preparations through arrangements to ease cross-sectoral and cross-company reallocation and to strengthen the lifelong learning of workers, especially considering that a priori the cross-sector transferability of knowledge between potential losers and potential winners does not appear to be particularly feasible.12  11  For illustrative purposes, if, as a result of implementing structural reforms, potential growth were to rise by 0.5 pp per annum, the debt ratio under the previous simulation would be 6 pp lower in 2030. 12 B. Anghel, A. Lacuesta and A. V. Regil (2020), “Transferibilidad de habilidades de los trabajadores en los sectores potencialmente afectados tras el Covid-19”, Artículos Analíticos, Banco de España, forthcoming.
In a medium-term horizon, the global economic growth rate is expected to converge in a lower balance than the one that has prevailed over the last two decades. This slowdown may be accompanied by economic and social problems for those countries, which would not know how to figure out their relevant implications. In a short-term horizon, discussions on the state’s role in the economy, on economic development and growth patterns, on the philosophy and appropriate practices regulating the financial markets, will dominate the political round-table debates. In particular, the economic growth model will be a sensitive topic for economies significantly affected by the crisis, including many Eastern European countries. Promoting competitive advantage and increasing competitiveness in global markets will be the subject of discussions and intended reforms. BIS Review 11/2010  1  Turning to domestic economic developments, the analysis of available indicators shows that the Albanian economy has had a positive economic growth during the first nine months of the year. However, these indicators suggest that the growth rate was characterized by a progressive slowdown during 2009. Such performance was conditioned by reduced foreign demand and slowed domestic demand, in the presence of a tight liquidity situation, financing restriction and increased uncertainty. According to preliminary data from INSTAT, the economic growth for the first nine-month period of the year was 4.9 percent, against 7.8 percent recorded for the same period of the previous year.

They include the quest for efficiency and greater effectiveness; the lessons learned from crises; political pressure - and its converse political opportunity; and what has from time to time been referred to as “fashion” but which I think can be more generously described as best practice. We have heard many times these last few days the familiar disclaimer that there is no “one model that fits all”. Many of you have stressed the uniqueness of your governance arrangements only to be reminded subsequently that these are arrangements familiar to one, two or even several other central banks. The modesty and diffidence with which experiences have been described is, of course, to be expected among central bankers. But there is, I think, a very pleasing mismatch between this and the enthusiasm with which all of us have been drinking up information about each other. This demonstrates that the BIS network is far more than an academic exercise. It also reflects an important truth: that, although our economic and political environments may differ widely, although we may pursue different policies and follow different legal structures, we all face a number of constants. Finance, money and banking behave in very similar ways no matter where we find ourselves, the more so with globalisation and liberalisation of markets. Politicians and the media the world over have the same qualities and the same vices. And so for that matter do central bankers. The human factor, which is at the root of all of our discussion on governance, is universal.