This reflects its strong public commitment to transparency, which is anchored in the law and has been designated by the CBC as a strategic objective to fulfill its mandate.” Additionally, it formulated a dozen recommendations for improvement. In its reply to the final report of this evaluation, the Board has committed to immediate actions in each of the areas with recommendations. These include (i) disseminating information in non-technical language on the structure and rationale of the CBC’s legal framework, and the legal foundations of its legal mandates for financial stability, macroprudential policy, and monetary financing rules; (ii) disseminating the methods, techniques, and data underlying previous assessments of monetary policy; (iii) improving the dissemination of macroprudential analysis by publishing ex post assessments of whether such policies had the expected effects; and (iv) improving the transparency regarding official relations with the government, local financial institutions, and international organizations. Finally, I would like to inform that the CBC has completed the preparation of the terms of reference for an independent assessment of the quality and information content of its economic projections. This evaluation will specifically compare the forecasts contained in the Monetary Policy Report for a set of macroeconomic variables with those derived from surveys, other macro-econometric models and from other central banks. This is on the understanding that these projections are an input for a broader decision-making process, such as the conduct of monetary policy. The evaluation will be carried out by three recognized international experts in macroeconomic modeling and projections.

In the first quarter, Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF) posted slight annual growth, driven by the recovery of its Machinery & Equipment component, which grew 21.5 percent annually. The Construction & Works item, on the other hand, fell by 10 percent year-on-year, due to works being slowed down and/or postponed because of the pandemic (Figure 2). The labor market has shown a noticeable, albeit heterogeneous, improvement with respect to its worst levels of last year. The measured magnitude of this improvement varies depending on the source of information: while National Statistics Institute (INE) data show the recovery of more than half of the jobs lost since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of pension fund and unemployment insurance contributors —which can be associated with formal salaried employment— has returned to pre-pandemic levels (Figure 3). At the same time, inactivity has declined, although it remains high by historical standards, and vacancies have increased, with the result that the unemployment rate remains at around 10 percent. In any case, there are different indicators showing the fragility and heterogeneity of the labor market’s recovery, even though it still has a long way to go. On the one hand, the recent extension of quarantines had a greater impact on self-employment and informal salaried work, and there was also an increase in unemployment insurance applications, although still below their 2020 levels. Low-skilled workers and women continue to be the segments that lagged the most in the recovery of employment (Figure 4).