Chairman, the 2009 Finscope Survey highlighted a number of barriers to financial inclusion, which were broadly categorized into   The physical access or proximity to financial institutions    Affordability of financial products  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1    Appropriateness of financial products    Regulation barriers such as know your customer requirements  Chairman, we know, for instance, that the apparent high cost of providing banking services to a population that is largely subsistence and therefore financially challenged excludes many from accessing financial services. Brick and mortar establishments are expensive to set up and even when they are set up, distance to the nearest branch for many, particularly for those in the rural areas becomes a problem. The findings relating to the cost of providing financial services contained again of the Finscope™ Zambia Survey (2005) goes some way in underscoring the nature of the problem. The survey found that about 32% of the banked reported that it costs them between K5,000–K10,000 to get to their bank while about 26% spend between K11,000–K25,000. At these cost levels it is not difficult to see why certain segments of our population do not actively seek financial services. The mobile payment system does therefore address some of these challenges and consequently can be an important platform for expanding the delivery of financial services. In some respects it complements conventional financial services or products. In other respects it makes up for the weakness of the conventional financial service providers.

This process has accelerated the fragmentation of production across borders, requiring additional efforts to adequately measure the value that each country contributes to the production chain of goods and services. This process of productive integration is known as Global Value Chains (GVC). In this context, the scope of idiosyncratic shocks has global repercussions, affecting the different economies involved in the GVC. As we noted in our latest Monetary Policy Report, the escalation of the trade war between the US and China has coincided with the continuous deterioration of various indicators of expectations and slowed down industrial prospects, investment and international trade figures. In fact, global trade is growing at its slowest pace since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. Our own calculations, using panel data of 28 economies, confirm that statement. Since the beginning of the confrontations, countries integrated into GVC would have had an additional slowdown in their exports, as well as weaker manufacturing prospect (PMI). On the side of prices, fragmented trade and digitization have been associated with both more synchronized global inflation and a stronger external impact on domestic prices. In addition, digitization allows prices to adjust rapidly to shocks to—or changes in—demand. The producers of statistics are an essential actor measuring this process and should make additional efforts to improve quality and timeliness while safeguarding the credibility of the statistics. International guidelines and recommendations are necessary, but not sufficient, to capture the particulars of each country.