samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Last but not least, other than the monetary policy, there is still a concern over the structural problem of the Thai economy in the medium and the long term. Given the tight labor market and increasing wage costs, we need to improve the country’s infrastructure and productivity. This involves the upgrading of technology and innovation to move Thailand up the value chain. The well-being of workforce, as well as quality of education and training are also crucial to increase competitiveness ahead of the AEC integration. This cannot be done by only one party. Long-term coherent vision and concerted efforts among all agencies, both public and private, are needed. Ladies and Gentlemen, To close my remark this evening, I believe that the JCC will have a big role in shaping Thailand’s future and I hope that with the long history of partnership between Japan and Thailand, we will continue our close cooperations in all aspects in the years to come. Thank you. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3

We nevertheless view the continued existence of our own independent currency, which can be freely traded on world markets, as an important asset for Switzerland in general, and for its financial sector in particular. e)  Efficient supervision  To be sure, no financial centre can survive without credible guarantees as to its soundness and robustness. As we know, financial institutions are different from other firms. Due to the complex ties that exist between them, and given that the very institution of money is built on trust, fragile elements can destabilise the entire industry. They can have devastating effects on the other players, including on fundamentally healthy institutions. A prerequisite for a successful financial centre is therefore a strong banking supervisory authority. f)  Integrity  All the ingredients mentioned so far are important building blocks of a flourishing financial centre. One should not forget, however, that the most significant factor for a successful banking system is the assurance that the public, and the bank customers in particular, be honestly and fairly treated. In short, without trust there can be no lasting successful financial centre. This is more than wishful thinking on the part of a central banker. It is obvious that it is in the selfinterest of any financial centre, of its lawmakers, its supervisory authorities and of its private agents and their associations to set and implement rules and codes of conduct that match the highest standards.
Take the example of reduced marginal tax. While reducing this tax will increase real wages, it does not automatically mean that people want to work more. This is because the wage increase has two effects. Firstly, it makes work more profitable relative to leisure and thus contributes to wanting to exchange leisure for work. On the other hand, an increased real wage means that one receives a larger income for the same amount of work and this means one can afford more leisure. There are thus two counteracting effects. Purely theoretically, it is impossible to say what the net effect will be; empirical research must attempt to answer this question. Many empirical studies have been made in this field, for instance, at the time of the large tax reform in the beginning of the 1990s. The result of the studies is not unequivocal, but a common conclusion appears to be that the labour supply calculated in hours increased after the tax reform, although the size of the effect is much debated. Comparing different groups, the effect seems to have been relatively larger among women and relatively smaller among those with a low income and/or that work part-time. One complication with this kind of study is that the labour provided by many people is probably determined at household level rather than individual level. The labour force participation for an individual may also be affected by changes in their husband’s/wife’s/partner’s income.

Christian Noyer: Monetary policy and the crisis – some lessons for the future Keynote address by Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France, at the ParisEuroplace Financial Forum, Tokyo, 16 November 2009. *  *  *  Central banks have been very active over the last two years in containing the impact of the financial crisis. Monetary policy has made an important contribution to stabilizing financial markets and the real economy. Today, however, I will not talk about our response to the crisis, whether by conventional or unconventional measures. I will rather focus on the longer term and address two questions: "Was monetary policy the cause of the crisis?" and "How can it contribute to preventing future crisis?" These are two different questions. And they call for differentiated answers. While I doubt very much that monetary policy played a major role in triggering the crisis, I also believe that it can – and should – help in the future to better contribute to financial stability. Was monetary policy the cause of the crisis? One major success in the two last decades has been the achievement of price stability in most industrialized and many emerging economies. This success has rightly been ascribed to the monetary policy framework almost universally adopted in the world, which, beyond national differences and specific features, is based on two common pillars: Central bank independence and price stability as a primary objective.
(a) Tradable goods or services are defined as those potentially tradable, rather than actually traded. Tradable sectors are defined as: agriculture, forestry and fishing; industry; information and communication services; and financial and insurance activities. Chart 8: Euro-area activity since the pre-crisis peak(a) Contribution to cumulative percentage change in GDP  20 10 0 -10 -20  Imports  -30  Exports  -40  Domestic demand GDP Germany France  -50 Italy  Spain  Portugal  Ireland  Greece Euro area  Sources: Eurostat and Thomson Reuters Datastream. (a) Pre-crisis peak is in 2008 Q1 other than for Italy (2007 Q3) and Portugal and Ireland (2007 Q4). 10  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Chart 9: Global imbalances United States (a) Vulnerable euro-area countries Japan (b) Oil exporters Rest of the world  United Kingdom Germany China Rest of Asia  Per cent of world GDP 3 2 1 0 -1 -2 -3  2000  2002  2004  2006  2008  2010  2012  2014  2016  2018  Source: International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook, April 2013. (a) Includes Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. (b) Includes Nigeria, Norway, Russia, Venezuela and the Middle East and North African region.

Like other central banks, we are constantly refining our forecasting tools to enable us to become better at predicting the future. Hopefully we will gradually increase the precision of our forecasts. However, at  2  BIS Review 101/2006  the end of the day it is not realistic to believe that we should be able to predict this type of event in its entirety. With regard to developments in recent years, it is also an important insight that inflation has been held down by forces that are essentially favourable for the economy. To put it another way, developments have been dominated by positive changes in what is known as the supply side of the economy. The fact that prices are pressed down by increased competition and increased foreign trade is something we all can benefit from – as consumers. And the fact that productivity growth in the economy is high should benefit everyone in the long term, in the form of increased welfare. Our monetary policy strategy Before we look ahead, it may be useful if I explain how we reason in general when making our interest rate decisions. The objective of monetary policy is price stability – in other words, low inflation. We have specified this as consumer prices, measured according to the consumer price index, increasing by two per cent a year. As it takes time before interest rate changes have an effect, monetary policy must be based on forecasts of the inflation rate a couple of years ahead.
20.06.2017  Testimony by the Governor of the Banco de España before the Parliamentary Committee on Economic Affairs and Competitiveness  Luis M. Linde Governor  Ladies and gentlemen, I appear before this Committee on the occasion of the presentation of the Banco de España Annual Report for 2016. I would like to begin by reviewing the most notable features of the current Spanish economic upswing, which began almost four years ago. I will then go on to describe the more immediate prospects for the Spanish economy, with reference to the Macroeconomic Projections Report published by the Bank on 13 June, and I will mention the main risks surrounding this outlook. Finally, I intend to address the main challenges for Spanish economic policy over a longer time horizon and to conclude with a brief reference to the challenges for the European project. The factors underlying the firming of the Spanish economic recovery According to the estimates available, Spanish GDP should have regained its pre-crisis level during the current quarter, after growing in 2015 and 2016 at a rate of 3.2%, which was notably higher than the rates recorded in the other main euro area economies and, in both years, higher than initially forecast. As regards the labour market situation, one of the main causes for concern for our economy and society, positive employment growth data are being recorded, which are also exceeding expectations.

In the current circumstance, the Federal Reserve’s liquidity programs act on the asset side of the balance sheet as the Fed lends funds against less liquid collateral and expands its asset holdings via purchases of agency debt, agency MBS and Treasuries. The goals are to slow down the pace of deleveraging to reduce the risk of catastrophic failure, improve market function and ease financial market conditions. In contrast, the Bank of Japan worked on the liability side of the balance. Their goal was to expand the amount of excess reserves held by the banking system so that the banks would be more willing to expand their credit provisions. Although the Fed’s activities have led to a big jump in excess reserves, this increase is incidental – a byproduct rather than goal of the asset-oriented programs. Second, as a consequence of this my point, the size of the balance sheet, is not a good metric for measuring the impact of the Fed’s facilities or the amount of stimulus that the Fed is providing via these programs. For example, consider the impact of the Fed facilities on rollover risk. A Fed facility that eliminates rollover risk might not be used at all. There might be no balance sheet impact. Nevertheless, the facility could have an important impact on market function and financial market conditions. It is not possible to mechanically map the size of the balance sheet back onto the impact on financial market conditions.
But I must say that NLB Tutunska Banka registered a reduction in the credit growth last year, and this year it continues. I had serious discussions with the Supervisory Board from Ljubljana, where we claimed that such behavior is inappropriate and could adversely affect the reputation of the bank. They promised to reconsider their policy, particularly as there is no reason for NLB Tutunska Banka not to grant loans in Macedonia. The bank does not rely on funding from the parent bank, it is fully financed from its own resources here in the country, it has one of the best credit portfolios, it is profitable, it has excellent liquidity, outstanding quality systems of credit risk management, probably one of the best in the country. Then why don’t they grant loans? This is the strategy of the parent bank, which must reduce its credit exposure for the entire group, and they impose those targets for all banks in the group proportionally, regardless of the situation in individual banks. Can our monetary authority tell a foreign bank that it has to increase lending? The bank should make rational decisions, and the decision they made is irrational because in that way they lose the profits they would make here. It would be more rational for the banks that have problems, to reduce their loan portfolio, while those that have no problems should expand it. And of course, NBRM is a regulator that constantly evaluates the shareholders, i.e. their eligibility to be shareholders in our banks.

It could also include eradication of poverty, reduction in crime and environmental sustainability. In the current environment of greater transparency and enhanced communication channels, there is now greater awareness of the prevailing circumstances. This has produced high expectations. It has also reduced tolerance for inefficiency, poor performance, irregular practices and nondelivery of the results. The expectations are for a public sector that best serves its nation and that delivers the expected results in the most effective and efficient manner. Similar to the private sector, the public sector is confronted with a dynamic environment of rapid change. Approaches that have produced previous successes may now have become no longer relevant. In these situations, previous skills and capabilities will no longer be adequate. In addition, it will be the cumulative efforts of all parts of the public sector that will  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  produce the results. It will no longer depend on a specific part of the system but on several parts of the system. Previous arrangements will therefore become no longer effective. New challenges that have become more complex will require new tools and systems to solve them. The organisation will thus need to be transformed to meet the changing requirements of the new environment. To contribute to a nation’s progress and development, therefore, demands for the ability to manage these new challenges. The role of the leadership in the public sector has thus changed significantly.
The opening up of the economy did not only not lead to the disappearance of industry and agriculture; it also raised Spaniards' standard of living significantly. In short, what was apparently a singular system protecting us was leading us down the road to disaster. It was not until an acute crisis hit us hard at the end of the 1950s that we realised  4  BIS Review 18/2009  that what distinguished us from other countries and what we thought was protecting us was actually achieving the opposite. It is now precisely in Spain, where employment protection purports to be in good health thanks to the high unemployment severance packages on top of government benefits, where labour shedding in the face of the current economic crisis is proving fiercer than in other countries. For this reason we should study the experience, for example, of Austria and Denmark, whose labour market reforms can offer us some ideas for reform at home. In Denmark, where the unemployment rate is 4.1%, the authorities opted to improve regular benefit payments and to practically eliminate redundancy payments. In Austria, where the unemployment rate is 3.8%, firms set up an individual fund for each worker which becomes available if workers loses their job, acting as a top-up to government unemployment benefits. When workers find employment in another firm, the unused portion of the fund goes with them and starts growing once again with the new firm’s contributions.

In addition, while recognising that many developed economies see a need to downsize their financial sectors and/or institutions, this need is not shared in the emerging world and less developed countries. The different mix of regulatory rules – allowing for faster growth of the financial sector in countries where its relative size is lower, even at the expense of higher riskiness of the sector, would also be welfare enhancing. After all, generally faster growth of less developed economies resulting from faster growth of their service sectors – comprising also financial services – would foster growth of the most developed countries’ export sectors and consequently overcome the slack caused by their need to restrict their financial sector growth rates. It is quiet fascinating how this observation – which in essence merely follows some of the basic logic of the Ricardian argument supporting free international trade – is being almost completely ignored in the current regulatory earthquake. This earthquake is mostly due to the financial crisis, which spread swiftly to the world primarily from the US and later from the Eurozone. The emerging markets were hit as well, some of them very strongly, but by and large their financial sectors have shown stronger resilience than in many developed countries. This was also the case of my country – the Czech Republic – as we have had no bankruptcy of any more significant financial institution and consequently no state aid in the financial industry for many years now. However, this is no reason for complacency.
In the last decade, where inflation has been 3.2% on average, output volatility has dropped markedly with respect to previous decades (Figure 2). These results suggest that the conduct of monetary policy by an autonomous central bank has had a first-order effect on our macroeconomic performance. As for the inflationary process, the research findings are encouraging. The greater credibility of the Central Bank regarding its inflationary objective, which is confirmed directly in the market’s inflationary expectations two years ahead, has reduced the well-known tradeoff between inflation and growth. The evidence shows that today inflation is better anchored in future inflation expectations. Inflation looks less to the past and more to the target. This means that when shocks hit the  BIS Review 156/2009  3  economy, the adjustments entail a smaller stabilization cost and, therefore, more output stability, without jeopardizing the inflationary objective (Céspedes and Soto, 2007). Proof of the importance of the central bank’s autonomy and the associated gain in credibility has to do with the capacity to implement countercyclical policies. The stabilizing actions of an autonomous central bank allow it to confront negative shocks without sacrificing credibility. A good example is the recent Chilean experience. The substantial injection of liquidity and the subsequent sharp cut in interest rates as a response to the international financial crisis of September 2008 occurred within a context where inflation expectations over the policy horizon remained in line with the inflation target.

Could that then have some impact on the feasibility of continued price stability in Sweden? Yet another risk is, of course, that the international price of crude oil does not fall back as most observers expect. It is not the oil price as such that is primarily important for the analysis but rather any impact it may have on other prices in the economy, for example wage increases. The discussion in the euro area has, moreover, highlighted the international crude oil price’s interaction with exchange rates. Risks of these types have to be weighed against the probability of a faster correction of existing imbalances in the world economy, for instance the US current account deficit, the level of stock markets and the dollar’s exchange rate. Assessing the likely course of such adjustments is exceptionally difficult. Instead of attempting to predict such a course, which may be impossible, one needs to be alert to signs that it is appearing. Concluding remarks The picture I have painted of the Swedish economy is fairly bright but it is accompanied by a number of clearly identified risks. It looks as though the favourable trend can continue but our economy is now in the cyclical phase that calls for heightened attention. The conceivable risks have to be assessed and weighed up by us on the Executive Board.
One significant characteristic of the current expansionary period is the fact that the sustained growth of activity has given rise to a high rate of increase in employment. Here, however, much remains to be done, since the current level of occupation is still some distance off the pre-2008 level. Another notable feature of the current recovery is the progress made in restoring macroeconomic and financial equilibria. This is playing a key role when it comes to explaining the intensity and duration of the current upturn. In this respect, it is worth mentioning the continuing and notable positive external balance and the subsequent reduction in the economy’s – and in particular the private sector’s – over-indebtedness; such progress has proven vital for restoring the confidence of foreign investors and of Spanish households and firms. The current account balance stood at close to 2% of GDP in 2017, a similar figure to that observed the previous year and up on the figures recorded in the early years of the recovery. True, some factors that have contributed to this improvement in the economy’s external balance have effects that tail off over time. This is the case of oil prices which, despite their recent rise, remain lower than those in force until mid-2014. Also, the improvement in financing conditions in recent years has provided for significantly lower interest payments abroad. Other explanatory factors behind the improvement in the balance vis-à-vis the rest of the world are structural in nature.

Between 2009 and 2012, they doubled their lending to infrastructure projects globally from $ to $ However, is more lending the solution? Despite a doubling of their lending in the last three years, they only contributed 16% of project debt financing volumes globally in 2012. Conceptually, a more efficient way to utilise their financial resources may be in the form of risk mitigants such as credit or risk guarantees. The G30 Working Group on Long-Term Financing has in fact recommended that governments and MDBs should provide risk mitigation instruments to help lower the higher risks involved, especially during the early phases of long-term projects. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  This is definitely worth considering. Given their status, MDBs and export credit agencies are seen as very credible counterparties that can provide risk mitigants. It is probably harder for the private sector to play such a role, especially given the long tenor of project finance. I would add that MDBs and export credit agencies already have guarantee products that mitigate credit and political risks for project loans. The issue at hand is how to extend these products to say capital market instruments to “crowd in” participation by a broader group of institutional investors. For instance, the Credit Guarantee & Investment Facility or CGIF, established by the Asian Development Bank and ASEAN+3 nations, recently completed its first guarantee transaction on a 3-year Thai baht bond issuance by Noble Group.