samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
According to the OECD, meanwhile, the density of industrial robots in the UK is one of the lowest in the OECD. 11  Although this doesn’t appear to be a positive news story,  it demonstrates the potential the UK has to increase the quantity and quality of capital intensity. Investment 8  Hauser (2017) Central Banking (2018) Office for Life Sciences (2017) 11 OECD (2017) 9  10  6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  in new technologies could indeed support a pickup in productivity. And on that positive note, I look forward to the panel discussion and your questions for us. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7  References Bell, J (2017) ‘Life sciences industrial strategy: a report to the Government from the life sciences sector’, 30 August 2017, available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/life-sciences-industrial-strategy  Carney, M. (2016) Opening remarks at the May 2016 Inflation Report Press Conference, available at: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/inflation-report/2016/may-2016 Central Banking (2018), ‘Initiative of the year: Bank of England’s FinTech Accelerator’, 23 January 2018, available at: https://www.centralbanking.com/awards/3333176/initiative-of-the-year-bank-of-englands-fintechaccelerator Haldane, A. (2017) ‘Productivity Puzzles’, Speech given at the London School of Economics, available at: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2017/productivity-puzzles Hauser, A.

The UK’s productivity growth challenge Speech given by Dave Ramsden, Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking, Bank of England  Babraham Hall, Cambridge Friday 23 February 2018  The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy Committee. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  Relevance of productivity for monetary policy  It is businesses that are vital for driving productivity, and it is crucial for the Bank and MPC to engage with and hear from all sorts of business, which is why we have a national network of agencies spread across the UK. It is a pleasure to be back in the region covered by the Bank’s South East and East Anglia Agency. It happens to be the region I was born and grew up in, and one I visit regularly on my bicycle at weekends, so I know what a diverse and vibrant region it is, economically and more generally. The monetary policymaker’s perspective on productivity is naturally a particular one. As MPC members, past and present, have noted, the future potential of the UK economy is not within the gift of monetary 1  policymakers. And monetary policy cannot offset the economic impacts of a large structural shock like Brexit.
On this note, I must stress that under-investment in human capacity and system of mid- and back-offices, as opposed to fronts, could prove costly. Building the capacity of mid- and back-offices may require in-house investment, as recruitment from market may not be as easy as front-office, but possibly more important, a change in management culture, which can only come from leadership of top management. Ladies and gentlemen, For those more conservative banks or financial markets, not affected in this first round hit, I also say that they cannot afford to be complacent. As in risk rating framework, it is neither the risk exposure nor risk management ability that determines bank’s riskiness, but the danger lies in the gap between the two. Therefore, banks, though engaged in less complex products would still be at risk if their ability to manage such risk is lagging behind their products. Indeed, the gap between risk exposure and management capacity becomes more important in a very volatile macroeconomic and financial environment. This is since such a gap may possibly emerge or expand undetected, given the dynamics of market events. Even with plain vanilla products, the exposure can become complex due to the number of positions used for different hedges and at different strikes. This is not to mention the complex layers of counterparty, with counterparty risk and concentration risk. At such time as this, caution is vital, because even conservative banks could be exposed to market risk from domestic assets as well as currency risk.

The rescue package also spans injecting capital into systemically important players, and neutralizing short-term market impact of valuation of toxic assets by underwriting those risks themselves. Ladies and Gentlemen, Up to now, banks in Asia have been less affected by the direct impact of the global financial turmoil. At this juncture, subprime-related losses have been lower in Asia than elsewhere. The estimated write down and credit loss, as recoded by Bloomberg on 28th October, is about 27 billion US dollars for Asia, compared with 430 billion US dollars in the U.S. and 221 billion US dollars in Europe. While this may be the case, the impact on regional capital markets, including the prices of bank stocks and widening credit spread, signals a much deeper concern. Events in the recent weeks reflected market worries of the second round impact via expected slowdown in the global economy, trade, and exports. Of course, the last leg to all of this is the currency volatility experienced by regional currencies. In fact, we saw, for the first time in this past decade, intervention by some regional central banks that would have been quite unthinkable a year ago. Looking ahead, significant downside risk to growth and upside risk to volatility remains. On the growth side, the October IMF World Economic Outlook sees the world economy entering a major downturn. Global growth is projected to slow substantially in 2008 and only a modest recovery would begin later in 2009.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  These discrepancies have reinforced the worries of some that weak potential supply growth will constrain the pace of recovery. Possible explanations for such weakness range from demographics to a slowing in the rate of technological progress. It seems unlikely that communicating in 140 characters – useful discipline though that is – represents the apex of human progress. Nor should central banks always and everywhere take supply as exogenous. Central banks can affect people’s decisions about how much to work and firms’ decisions about how much to invest. When the outlook is particularly uncertain, as it is in the wake of a major financial crisis, this influence could affect potential supply. Monetary policymakers must consider the extent to which their decisions affect, not just depend on, the path of output.3 In the US this question has been the subject of much debate. A recent Federal Reserve Board paper argues that potential supply growth is likely to respond to demand as the economy recovers, for example through capital deepening, as well as the behaviour of the labour market.4 The rise in unemployment here in the US has been tempered by a fall in the rate of labour force participation and a slowdown in productivity growth (Charts 4 and 5). It is quite possible that, with a recovery in demand, those discouraged from looking for work will return to the labour force. Given the risks of hysteresis, that is more likely to happen the more quickly demand recovers.

Today, I want to explore those deeper questions and what they mean for policy. But before raising the pessimists’ challenge, let me first keep with recent practice by setting out this year’s reasons for optimism. Grounds for optimism The news from the UK is positive. Inflation has fallen, from more than 5% in 2011 to 2.2% now, jobs are being created at a rate of 60,000 per month, and growth is – for the moment – the strongest in the advanced world.1 This recovery is relatively recent, having started in earnest during the second quarter of the year. Its timing and pace caught most unawares. Certainly, the cumulative run of economic surprises has dwarfed those of the other major advanced economies (Chart 2). With the wisdom of hindsight, there were three main drivers of the recovery: a marked reduction in extreme uncertainty (Chart 3); significant progress on repairing the core of the financial system, with risk-weighted capital ratios doubling in recent years; and a marked improvement in household balance sheets, where debt to income ratios have fallen by about 30 percentage points. Together, improved access to finance and raised expectations of future prospects led to a reduction in precautionary savings by households, a modest recovery in consumer spending, a revival in housing investment from very low levels and an increase in business confidence to a 15-year high.
Notably, commodity prices in general – and that of oil in particular – rose rapidly in the face of strong demand from China as well as from Brazil, Russia and India. Policy-makers who focused on measures of core inflation that excluded energy prices neglected the latter effect. They may have formed an overly benign impression of the consequences of globalisation for price developments, and adopted an overly loose monetary policy as a result. Thus far, my discussion of the conjunctural assessment has focused on indicators motivated by the benchmark New Keynesian framework. But we need to include the financial sector. What indicators were missed by central banks prior to the crisis due to the neglect of financial factors? What additional indicators should be embodied in the conjunctural assessment? Monetary and credit aggregates can – and did – have a role to play. At least in part, the ECB’s oft-maligned monetary analysis was vindicated by the crisis. If central banks had taken the signals coming from strong monetary and credit growth in mid-decade more seriously, monetary policy decisions might have been better calibrated to contain the financial imbalances that ultimately led to the financial crisis. But recent events have also revealed weaknesses in traditional monetary indicators. Experience points to a need to deepen and broaden such analyses to take better account of the fundamental changes observed in the financial sector over recent decades. New aggregates and indicators need to be developed. 23 Work at the ECB is proceeding in this direction.

“The post-crisis fix: Regulatory or monetary policy remedies?” paper presented at the Reserve Bank of India’s First International Research Conference (February); P. De Grauwe and D. Gros (2009), “A new two-pillar strategy for the ECB”, CEPS policy brief no.191. 8  See: O. Blanchard, G. Dell’Ariccia and P. Mauro (2010). “Rethinking macroeconomic policy”, IMF staff position note no. 10/03 http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/spn/2010/spn1003.pdf. 4  BIS Review 45/2010  by most leading central banks. At the ECB, we are fortunate that the primacy of price stability has been made explicit. With this in mind, it is difficult to attribute any pre-crisis “policy error” to the pursuit of the wrong monetary policy objective. Nonetheless, we are already witnessing the emergence of siren calls to change the objective – in particular, for monetary policy to target a higher steady-state inflation rate, difficult to reconcile with price stability. These calls must be resisted. Emphasising the primacy of price stability objective over the medium term does not imply central bankers should be, in the words of Mervyn King, “inflation nutters”. 9 Using Theil’s framework to characterise the monetary policy problem also helps to clarify its dynamic nature. Recognising the long and variable lags in the transmission of monetary policy and the inevitability of short-term shocks to price dynamics, policy-makers need to adopt a mediumterm orientation in their decisions. Attempts to fine-tune price developments on a short-term basis are doomed to failure.
Textbook flexible inflation targeting The textbook account of a flexible inflation targeting regime explains that when interest rates are set to bringing inflation back to the target, consideration is also given to the effects on the real economy; an appropriate balance between inflation and real variability is sought, which implies that an immediate reversal to the target is not an end in itself. Textbook accounts of flexible inflation targeting typically give the following answer to the question of how asset prices should be factored into the monetary policy decision: monetary policy should respond to changes in asset prices to the extent that they affect the inflation and growth forecasts. Thus, there is no independent role for e.g. rapidly rising house prices. Their effect on the monetary policy decision should come only through their effect on the inflation and growth forecasts. This recommendation, and the assumptions on which it is based, is something I will comment more on, below. Leaning against the wind Another view often put forward is that a central bank can bring about better outcomes for inflation and output by reacting to rapidly rising asset prices, over and above their implications for inflation and growth.

We often talk about asset markets in very general terms without going into any great detail. In this context one can argue that monetary policy is a blunt instrument and considerations of risks associated with credit and asset markets should be left to the supervisory structures in place. In principle, supervisory rules can be fine tuned towards different asset markets in a more precise way than monetary policy. If prudential rules are or become binding we are also likely to see some macroeconomic consequences of these policies. In my view it is far from obvious how much weight is to be put on monetary policy and how much on supervision. Monetary policy can play a role, albeit perhaps a limited one, not the least because this will help to manage inflation expectations over the long term. Furthermore, when imbalances build up monetary policy and supervision can support one another. Criticism from different sides… I mentioned in the beginning that we have been criticized from many angles. Thus, in the very same year that an outside review came to the conclusion that the Riksbank had given too much independent weight to house price developments, other Riksbank-watchers criticized us for neglecting the ongoing build-up in house prices and debt levels. Some market commentators in Sweden have in the past year referred to the rapidly rising house prices as a reason for increasing the repo rate at a substantially faster rate than our published interest rate forecasts.
The Federal Reserve also has recently initiated some new data collection and analytical efforts as it has responded to the crisis and in anticipation of new financial and economic developments. For supervision of the largest institutions, new quantitative efforts have been started to better measure counterparty credit risk and interconnectedness, market risk sensitivities, and funding and liquidity. The focus of these efforts is not only on risks to individual firms, but also on concentrations of risk that may arise through common exposures or sensitivity to common shocks. For example, additional loan-level data on bank exposures to syndicated corporate loans are now being collected in a systematic manner that will allow for more timely and consistent measurement of individual bank and systemic exposures to these sectors. In addition, detailed data obtained from firms’ risk-management systems allow supervisors to examine concentration risk and interconnectedness. Specifically, supervisors are aggregating, where possible, the banks’ largest exposures to other banks, nonbank financial institutions, and corporate borrowers, which could be used to reveal large exposures to individual borrowers that the banks have in common or to assess the credit impact of a failure of a large bank on other large banks. Additional time and experience with these data will allow us to assess the approach’s ability to signal adverse events, and together they will be a critical input to designing a more robust and consistent reporting system.

Today, I can proudly say that an ever-growing number of financial institutions operate in the North and that these provide diverse financial services, whilst of course we would be the first to admit that a lot more needs to be done. My dear friends, the development and maintenance of essential public infrastructure is an important ingredient for sustained economic growth and poverty reduction. In particular, health, education, electricity, housing and efficient water and sanitation services help lay the groundwork for a productive and healthy population, capable of contributing to sustained economic growth. We all know that as a result of the long and bloody conflict, the infrastructure facilities in the North could not be developed as done in the other Provinces. It is due to that fact that, with a view to fast tracking the development in the North, the Government has now launched a well-planned, integrated, accelerated development program titled “Vadakkin Vasantham.” Under this program, the Government expects to invest approximately Rs. 295 billion $ 2.7 billion) during the next 3 years, towards rehabilitation and development activities. This program is expected to cover the rehabilitation of roads and other transportation infrastructure, the upgrading of electricity for domestic housing and industry, water supply, agriculture and irrigation infrastructure and the improvement of the manufacturing framework. The Government also intends to implement a special poverty reduction program and establish the required social safety net, quickly.
This is likely to be a fairly general result, whether the externality is between shareholders and creditors or between shareholders and wider society. The most straightforward way of tackling embedded stakeholder externalities is to have those stakeholders’ interests weighed explicitly in the objectives and decision-making of the company. In practical terms, that would mean modifying the objectives, rights and responsibilities of a firm under Company Law. Such modifications are not, in fact, that radical either from an historical or international perspective. History clearly suggests that shareholder primacy has not always been the centrepiece of company law. Nor has the current practice of endowing only shareholders with explicit control rights. Even today, international experience suggests a range of other corporate models can operate successfully. The UK and US shareholder-centric model sits very much towards one end of the international spectrum (Allen and Gale (2000)). In countries such as Japan, German and France, employees and other firms, especially banks, are assigned a more prominent role on the boards and in the running of companies. In the language of German company law, there is “co-determination” in the decisions of the company. As an illustration of that, Chart 11 is drawn from a survey of senior executives at large companies in the UK, US, Japan, Germany and France. On the question “Whose company is it?”, a strong majority in all countries, bar Japan, view shareholders, rather than broader stakeholders, as the ultimate owners.

Here, we would have to look at the circumstances of each case – whether, for example, the offshore internet bank advertised its services in the local Hong Kong press or accepted Hong Kong dollar deposits or refused to take deposits from a number of specified jurisdictions, but did not include Hong Kong among these. If we come across such cases of illegal advertisements targeted at Hong Kong, how would we deal with them? The easiest case would be where the bank itself is respectable and is based in an overseas location which is properly supervised. We could then write to the bank itself and to its supervisors to notify them of the advertising rules in Hong Kong, and request the bank either to comply with these rules or to add Hong Kong to the list of the jurisdictions from which it was not prepared to take deposits. If necessary, we would seek the cooperation of the home supervisor to enforce this request. It might also be necessary to supplement this with a reminder to local Internet Service Providers about the advertising rules in the Banking Ordinance and to seek their cooperation to block offending websites. The problem with this, however, is that the website in question may not actually be posted on the local ISP’s server – in which case, there may be little that the ISP can do. If the bank concerned is not respectable and it is based in an uncooperative jurisdiction, the situation would be more difficult to handle.
He made a substantial contribution to the development of accounts for the nation as a whole – national accounts. When economists worldwide discuss concepts such as gross domestic product, private consumption and investment, this can to a large extent be attributed to Frisch. Together with Trygve Haavelmo, also a Nobel laureate in economics, Frisch contributed to giving the Department of Economics at the University of Oslo a proud past. Frisch was sceptical as to whether market forces alone would ensure an efficient distribution of resources. Equipped with new tools, he saw the economist as a sort of social engineer who, with the help of mathematical models, detailed accounts and proposals for regulation, management and control, could assist government and parliament in improving living standards and welfare. Confidence in government planning and management marked Norwegian economic policy in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Self-confidence among economists was considerable, as was their influence on economic policy. The work was led by former students of Frisch, such as Erik Brofoss who became finance minister and later also central bank governor. The following quote from his presentation of the central government budget in 1946 reflects his ambitions: “People have gradually managed to free themselves from the oppression of the forces of nature through scientific and technical progress. They have succeeded in breaking the chains of nature that have restrained humanity.

Additionally, with this arrangement, we aim to reduce the sensitivity of the costs of holding Turkish lira required reserves against the CBRT’s policy rates and thus strengthen the automatic stabilization feature of the Reserve Option Mechanism. Distinguished Guests, As for the loans, we see that the macroprudential measures and our tight monetary stance have helped to keep the pace of loan growth at reasonable levels. The annual rate of total loan growth is 16 percent, below the 2007-2013 average of 23 percent, as of October 2014. In terms of loan trends, the annualized growth rate of consumer loans continues to hover at low levels while commercial loans remain relatively more robust (Charts 7 and 8). I would like to emphasize that this loan outlook will both restrain medium-term inflationary pressures and support the improvement of the current account balance. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  2. Macroeconomic developments and assumptions  Distinguished Guests, Now, I will talk about the macroeconomic outlook and our assumptions on which our forecasts are based. First, I will summarize the recent inflation developments, and then continue with the domestic and foreign demand outlook. Annual consumer inflation fell by 0.3 points quarter-on-quarter to 8.86 percent in the third quarter of 2014, while inflation excluding unprocessed food and tobacco at 8.37 percent was mostly consistent with our July Inflation Report forecasts (Charts 9 and 10). Due to adverse weather conditions and cumulative effects of exchange rate changes, food prices remained the subcategory making the greatest contribution to inflation.