samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Today, you are gathered here to deliberate on current trends, challenges and opportunities in building a social enterprise ecosystem and to help social enterprises and SMEs to scale up and create social impact, under the timely theme of “Think Social -Produce Social - Buy Social”. I believe this conference would be an effective pathway, particularly for emerging and prospective entrepreneurs to explore new markets for social goods and services and also an opportunity to share knowledge on successful social ventures at both local and global levels. You are all aware that maintaining a stable macroeconomic environment through economic and price stability and financial system stability are the core objectives of the Central Bank. Promoting regional development is one of the agency functions of the Central Bank. Promoting social enterprises is therefore, associated with the broader objectives of the Central Bank. In that context, the Central Bank, on behalf of the Government, has a mandate for targeted lending to the microfinance, SME and agriculture sectors, as well as youth and women. In implementing this mandate, the Central Bank has been facilitating and implementing refinance schemes, interest subsidy schemes and credit guarantee schemes targeting the MSMEs. 2  In addition, the Central Bank has embarked upon developing a National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), to introduce an evidence-based, prioritized, better resourced, and more comprehensive approach to expanding access to financial services. This would be an essential policy tool that will coordinate and implement cross-cutting actions and reforms, to increase financial inclusion in the country.

Their prospects are being enhanced by the trend in consumer choice towards healthier, Eco-friendly and "social goods". "Social buyers" who are keen to buy goods and services from social enterprises are emerging as a new force. In conclusion, a concerted effort is needed to establish policies and systems to support the growth of the emerging social enterprise sector in Sri Lanka. I hope today’s deliberations will deliver outcomes which will 3  assist social entrepreneurs to lead social change by stimulating economic growth, innovation and the development of social capital. Social enterprises have an important role to play in Sri Lanka meeting the SDGs. Thank you. 4
Jean-Pierre Danthine: Reconciling price and financial stability Speech by Mr Jean-Pierre Danthine, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the University of Zurich, Zurich, 24 January 2012. *  *  *  I would like to thank Pierre Monnin, Anna Faber and Adriel Jost for their invaluable support in drafting this paper. I also thank Rita Kobel, Peter Kuster, Reto Nyfeller, Dewet Moser and Angelo Ranaldo for their insightful comments. It is a great pleasure for me to be with you today at the University of Zurich to discuss an issue that the recent financial crisis has exposed as a major challenge to central banks; namely how they can best contribute to ensuring financial stability while pursuing price stability as a primary mandate.1 Before I do this, however, let me say a few words on another dimension of stability: institutional stability. As you are all aware, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) recently experienced an unfortunate event which has few, if any, historical precedents. On a personal level, I deeply regret the resignation of Philipp Hildebrand, under whose leadership the SNB steered Swiss monetary policy over the last two years. On an institutional level, however, I would like to stress that the SNB’s institutional strength is the result of teamwork, not only between the board members, but across the Bank as a whole. The SNB’s culture is one of excellence and of service. It is the product of a long history and many generations of leaders.

The objective would be to avoid the overvaluation of assets, to constrain excessively risky behaviour on the part of financial intermediaries and hence to prevent bubbles from emerging, or at least to reduce their size. In contrast, Alan Greenspan was widely credited for supporting a “clean up after bubbles” approach. This basically involves central banks actively sustaining the economy after an asset price bubble has burst, rather than using monetary policy to try to prevent the bubble from developing in the first place. The rationale for this approach is that it is more costeffective overall, as bubbles are very hard to identify. Erroneously implemented “leaning against the wind” policies could well impose significant economic costs with no real subsequent benefit. The huge cost of the recent financial crisis has decreased the weight of such objections to “leaning against the wind”. It is therefore important to further examine the potential of a preventive policy. Charles Bean et al16 strive to estimate the impact a “leaning against the wind” would have had on asset prices and real output in the recent financial crisis. The charts in Slide 6 show the simulated impact on credit, real estate prices and GDP growth of a policy which would push US interest rates 200 basis points higher than were actually observed between 2003 to 2006. The slide illustrates that the simulated policy would probably have kept real house prices some 7.5 percent lower than they were at their peak.
And as major financial crises do not, I am glad to say, occur so often and the banks’ data is often limited, there is actually a risk that they will underestimate the risks in their lending. A gross solvency requirement as a complement to the standard capital adequacy requirement thereby acts as an extra safety measure. In response to the criticism from the Swedish banks there is another factor that I would like to take up. In Sweden, the banks can lend money to households with very little risk. This is because the historical losses for mortgage lending in Sweden have been at very low levels. This in turn can be explained by a number of factors. One explanation is that in contrast to many other countries we do not have a speculative housing market on which households buy several houses or flats for investment purposes and thus take a high risk. Another is that we have a legal structure in which private individuals have to live with their debts until they are repaid. In general, people cannot get rid of their debts by filing for personal bankruptcy. A third reason is that we have a social insurance and benefits system that means that people who become unemployed, for example, do not lose their entire income. The likelihood of borrowers not wanting or not being able to make the interest and amortization payments on their loans is therefore relatively small.

Such a monetary reaction was motivated by the need for increasing the attractiveness of the CB bills, in order to redirect the Denar liquidity from the foreign exchange market and to ease the pressures on the foreign exchange rate. Although after the increase in the core interest rate of the National Bank, from the beginning of the second quarter, moderate stabilization of the movements on the foreign exchange market was registered and the demand for foreign exchange began to decrease, however, also during April and May, the interventions of the National Bank on the foreign exchange market continue to reduce to net sale of foreign exchange. Simultaneously, the trend of currency conversion of the households' savings from national into foreign currency continued, indicating that although after the culmination in March (during the presidential and local elections) the psychological pressures began to ease, they are not completely depleted. Such accomplishments were the reason for additional intervention with new measures. In May, we increased the reserve requirement allocation rate for the banks' liabilities with currency component, as follows: for liabilities in foreign currency, from 10% to 13%, and for the liabilities in domestic currency with FX clause, from 10% to 20%. The undertaken measures should stimulate the Denar saving and we expect to cause change in the trend of accumulation of foreign assets by the banks, which would contribute to decrease in the demand for foreign exchange and to stabilization on the foreign exchange market. And definitely, part of the expectations is already happening.
Note: A positive gender pay gap in this chart indicates that women earn less than men. Finally, if we look at unconditional gender pay gaps by sector (Chart 10), these gaps are broadly-based across sectors. The largest gaps are in the finance sector, both in London and the rest of the UK. These average close to 40%. This is materially larger than the next-worst sector, ICT, which averages around 30%. The evolution of the gender pay gap in finance suggests it has fallen only modestly, from over 45% in the mid-1990s to around 38% in 2018. 13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  13  Chart 10: Median gender pay gap by sector, sample average  Gender pay gap, per cent  45 40  London  Other  35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0  Agriculture  Industry  Construction  Trade and transport  ICT  Male male  Finance  Real Estate  Professional Public sector  Other  Female female  Source: ONS Labour Force Survey and Bank of England calculations. Note: A positive gender pay gap in this chart indicates that women earn less than men. The unconditional ethnicity pay gap exhibits a rather different pattern than the gender pay gap. This gap has also been materially lower, averaging around 4% over the sample. As the gender gap fell sharply in the decade to 2005, the ethnicity pay gap was broadly stable at around 2% (yellow dots in Chart 11).

17  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  17  Chart 14: Median ethnicity pay gap by sector, sample average Ethnicity pay gap, per cent  London  20  Other 15  10  5  0  ‐5  ‐10  ‐15 Agriculture  Industry  Construction Trade and transport  ICT  Ethnic minority minority ethnic  Finance  Real Estate Professional Public sector  Other  White white  Source: ONS Labour Force Survey and Bank of England calculations. Note: A positive ethnicity pay gap in this chart indicates that ethnic minorities earn less than their white counterparts, whereas a negative ethnicity pay gap indicates that ethnic minorities earn more than their white counterparts. If we look at ethnic minority workers at a more granular level, some interesting cohort effects emerge. There is a very wide dispersion of pay among different ethnic minority cohorts, with some having negative and others positive pay gaps compared with their white counterparts (Chart 15). Median hourly pay is highest for those of Chinese ethnicity, at just over £ or around 15% higher than for whites. There are also negative pay gaps, though smaller ones, for workers from a mixed/multiple ethnic and Indian background. At the other end of the spectrum, there are significantly positive pay gaps for other ethnic minority cohorts, including black and Afro-Caribbean workers. The largest pay gaps are for workers from a Pakistani and Bangladeshi background, which average 13% and 20%, respectively (Chart 15).
Paul Tucker: Macro and microprudential supervision Speech by Mr Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, at the British Bankers’ Association Annual International Banking Conference, London, 29 June 2011. *  *  *  Introduction: redrawing the Social Contract for banking. The past month has been pretty busy. It has seen the publication of the draft legislation for reforming the UK’s regulatory architecture; the launch of the high-level blueprint for banking supervision under the future Prudential Regulation Authority; the Chancellor’s comments on the Vickers Report; and the first meeting and decisions of the Financial Policy Committee, the UK’s new macroprudential body. That’s just in the UK! There is plenty going on internationally too. Next month the G20 Financial Stability Board will publish two consultative papers: one on the greater loss absorbing capacity needed by systemically important financial institutions, and the other on overhauling resolution regimes to cope with distress at SIFIs. It is understandably hard for the banking system and the market to make sense of how all this fits together. I therefore want today to organise it in terms of redrawing the Social Contract between banking and the rest of society. Traditionally, the Contract was as follows. As deposit takers, banks are permitted to issue money, enabling them to profit by providing liquidity-insurance services to the rest of the economy. They earn a spread between the rate paid on transactions deposits and the rate charged on loans that, on average, more than compensates for credit risk.

Yet they did not spend much time working out how to handle a firm’s failure in the event of prophylactic supervision proving insufficient. That was a major problem in the very conception of prudential regulation and supervision, going back decades. In future in the UK, a core role of supervisors will be to work backwards from what would happen at the point of failure. A bank’s resolvability and the likely consequences for the system if it failed will be incorporated into the Prudential Regulation Authority’s planned risk-assessment framework, which will replace ARROW as Hector Sants has explained. Recovery and Resolution Plans – or “living wills” – will be required to ensure that failure does not lead to avoidable disorder. In pursuing this, the supervisors will need to work closely with the team in the Bank who operate the UK’s Special Resolution Regime. That should be helped enormously by the planned new Proactive Intervention Framework or PIF, a major reform involving each firm being “Staged” for internal purposes by the prudential supervisors. My personal expectation is that it would be an odd world if there weren’t quite a few firms at Stage 2 even in a more benign economic and financial environment. And as a bank’s PIF ranking rises, the Resolution team will progressively become more engaged with it. The details of this need to be worked on by Hector and me with our teams, but it will be a big change from the past.
The euro area’s recovery is on track and gaining momentum, but still weak, as inflation expectations are not rising and core  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  inflation has levelled out. In December the Eurosystem staff macroeconomic projections will inform our decision. Given that the ECB has already sent strong signals to the financial markets, aren’t you obliged to act now? No. The decisions we take are based on the economy, not financial markets. We are currently asking ourselves the following question: are some factors, such as the fall in the price of raw materials, temporary? Or rather, will they prevent in a lasting way inflation from returning towards 2%? If the answer to the second question turned out to be yes, additional measures would be taken. In December we will take a decision based on the information we have available to us. In December the US Federal Reserve System (Fed) will take a decision on whether to maintain its key rates at zero or increase them. Will their decision influence yours? It will have no direct impact on our decision. Whatever the Fed decides, our monetary policy framework (zero rates, liquidity, “forward guidance” and asset purchases) allows us to keep interest rates low, no matter what happens in the rest of the world. Our policy protects the interest rate curve for the euro area from external shocks. What interests us above all is what the Fed’s decision tells us about the US economy.

Again, this was by far a higher percentage than anywhere else in the EU, where on average only around 6% cited high costs as a reason for turning down a loan. In the same vein, the proportion of Maltese businesses replying that interest rates charged on loans had decreased was among the lowest. These results support the information obtained from an analysis of bank interest rates. In general, while domestic banks have reduced interest rates charged on loans to households by more than the average in the euro area following the cumulative cut of 325 basis points in official rates by the ECB since 2008, the opposite is true for loans to NFCs. This suggests that domestic NFCs, most of which are small enterprises, are finding it more expensive to obtain or service a loan than their counterparts in the euro area. This apparent relative rigidity of domestic interest rates charged to NFCs merits further analysis as it could harm the recovery process, particularly if businesses continue to postpone their investment plans. Other constraints faced by small enterprises in Malta The same survey also provides an insight into the broader range of concerns faced by domestic micro and small enterprises. These include the limited purchasing power of customers, obstacles faced in trying to expand market share and competitive pressures. In addition, a disproportionately high percentage of these businesses reported higher costs in 2009.
But they are also needed in many EMEs, including in Malaysia. They are needed to ensure that economic growth is based on strong foundations and therefore will be more sustained and sustainable. Yet, the pace of structural reforms in most economies has been very slow and has lacked momentum. The main reason behind this inertia is often the stranglehold of vested interest. On this point, let me quote Mr. Travis Kelanik, the founder of the taxi service app Uber, which last week caused the black cab drivers in London to go on strike. He was reported in the Wall Street Journal as saying: “…there’s so much corruption and so much cronyism in the taxi industry and so much regulatory capture that if you ask permission up front for something that is already legal, you’ll never get it. There’s is no upside to them.” Clearly, the taxi industry is not the only one that has this characteristics, nor is it the only one that would be resistant to competition and structural change. Another reason for the inertia is that structural reforms often entail short-term pain even if they do provide long-term gain. Note the protests that have occurred in the crisis-affected economies in response to structural measures that governments in those economies have been forced to implement. The short-term pain makes structural reforms a politically difficult decision. There are sectors of society that would be adversely affected by these reforms and they will not take it kindly. Therefore, it takes political courage.

After the crisis, there was some excitement about domestic demand being the driver of growth, and there was some justification for such enthusiasm. There was certainly a component related to the growth in incomes and private demand. But there was also a significant component related to public spending and the rapid growth of domestic credit. The outcome is higher debt levels for both households and the Government. This is clearly not a sustainable strategy for growth. Indeed, the experience has shown that there are limits to how fast and how sustainably we can grow by relying on domestic demand alone. Therefore, going forward, while domestic demand will continue to support growth, we really need to strengthen our integration with both the regional and global economy, and by implication, strengthen our overall level of economic competitiveness, if we are to achieve sustainable growth over the long term. Returning to the economic outlook, the good news is that we are seeing more sustained growth around the world and that is already beginning to benefit Malaysia and creating more balanced growth of the Malaysian economy. Now what are the potential clouds over this rather sunny outlook? There are several, but in the interest of time, I will just mention five. The first of this is the slow recovery of investment in the AEs after the crisis. It has been noted that this recovery, unlike recoveries from past recessions, has been accompanied by rather lackluster investment. This is despite the fact that companies are sitting on large piles of cash.
Non-performing loans continued to decline in 2015, falling by more than € billion (against the fall of € billion in 2014). At end-2015 the proportion of NPLs on Spanish banks’ balance sheets was 22% down on the previous year. This trend has been seen both in credit to non-financial corporations and in that to households. Profitability is unquestionably a fundamental challenge facing European and Spanish banks. In 2015, consolidated income at the global level for the sector as a whole was close to € billion, almost 13% down on the previous year; and the return on equity fell from 6.9% in  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  2014 to 5.6% in 2015. In terms of domestic business, profitability was worse than for consolidated activity at the global level, with the ROE in 2015 standing at 4.4% (against 5% in 2014). The main factor bearing down on the sector’s profitability may be said to be the environment of very low interest rates, and this environment might be expected to hold as long as inflation expectations justify the highly expansionary monetary policy stance in the euro area. The spread between the return on assets and liabilities in domestic business is at levels very close to all-time lows. Also, there is little room for further downward movement as regards the cost of funds; accordingly, if asset-side rates continue falling, net interest income may continue declining. But we should mention another two factors bearing down on profitability.

2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Net income for the cooperative sector as a whole in 2015 exceeded € million, entailing an increase of close to 15% on 2014. The return on equity was 4.8%, having increased by somewhat more than 0.5 pp in 2015. This improvement in profitability is due to the almost 60% reduction in asset impairment losses over the past year (practically € million), the result of the reduction in NPLs I mentioned earlier. Net interest income held relatively stable, with both revenue and financial costs having fallen, while the efficiency ratio improved by several percentage points. As regards the sector’s solvency, the highest quality capital ratio, namely CET1, for Spanish cooperatives as a whole was 13.7% in December 2015, almost 70 bp up on the related December 2014 level. This gives a level of CET1 almost 1 pp higher than the aggregate for the Spanish banking sector. In conclusion, the cooperative sector in Spain is holding up with figures and ratios in line with those of the rest of the banking sector, and is currently evidencing solvency levels somewhat higher than those of the rest of the sector. Regulatory agenda: recent developments in the Basel III capital framework I would now like to review the reforms outstanding. But I shall first offer you a brief reminder of the key elements of the new regulatory framework we know as Basel III.