samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We will be having six rounds of talks each year with business and community leaders concerning financial developments in their enterprises and industries, with about 200 visits in each round. The selection of contacts represents the production side of the economy, both industry-wise and geographically. In the course of 2003, the number of contacts in the network will rise to about 1000 persons. These individuals will be contacted once or twice a year. Kunnskapsparken in Bodø conducts the contact meetings in Region North. In general, our contacts in Region North reported at the end of August and the beginning of September that developments continue to be sluggish. The fishing industry is still experiencing difficult times, even though some enterprises have reported a slight increase in demand for certain species and products. Companies supplying goods and services to the fisheries and aquaculture sector are experiencing a decline in demand and output and a number of companies only have a few service orders. The household service sector is reporting a small increase in demand, whereas companies’ demand for services is generally stagnant or falling slightly. The public sector is reducing the number of employees, while retail trade and the construction sector are planning a slight increase in the number of employees. The rise in costs in the last few years has not fed through to prices due to intense competition, both from abroad and from other market participants in Norway. Instead, enterprises has reduced activity and implemented extensive efficiency- enhancing measures.

The public sector employs more than one-third of the labour force in Norway. In Northern Norway, public sector employees account for close to 45 per cent of the labour force. The primary industries are important for the counties in Northern Norway, especially the utilisation of the abundant fish resources in the coastal areas. A large part of the fishing industry is export-oriented and is increasingly competing with low-cost countries. These industries will be vulnerable when the rise in domestic costs is high. There are wide regional variations in unemployment. At the end of July, the number of registered unemployed in Northern Norway came to 4.4 per cent of the labour force, which is slightly higher than the national average of 4.1 per cent. Even though the region has somewhat higher unemployment than the national average, the rise in unemployment in Northern Norway has been relatively low in the last year. Unemployment has only risen half as much in Northern Norway as in the rest of the country. The number of unemployed has risen least in the county of Finnmark in the last year. This is probably related to the industry structure which is characterised by a relatively high share of employees in the public service sector. As I have mentioned, a look at the current situation in this part of the country and similar reports from the other regions represent important information in the work on setting interest rates. The short-term nominal interest rate in Norway has now reached a historically very low level.
Yves Mersch: Back to stable Speech by Mr Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the Zahlungsverkehrssymposium, Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main, 29 May 2019. * * * The primary objective of the ECB is to ensure price stability. This is also the best contribution we can make to achieving sustainable growth.1 Since the launch of the euro, the ECB has delivered on this commitment and rendered price stability a reality, maintaining an average inflation rate of below, but close to, 2%. And that is why the majority of euro area citizens trust the euro.2 Their trust is contingent on the independence of the central bank. Independence is granted to central banks to prevent politicians from seeking electoral gain through measures which boost economic activity in the short term but damage the long-term health of the economy and the country. It is also recognised that legal tender needs to be issued by a public authority. In the case of the EU, it falls to the ECB to issue the euro and decide on the denomination of banknotes. We could not accept a situation in which, for anti-European or populist motives, certain euro denominations were not allowed to be used in some parts of the EU. This established consensus is being challenged by private initiatives triggered by technical innovation. We are seeing ever more solutions in search of a problem. Bitcoin and other crypto-assets claim to need neither trust nor the backing of a sovereign.

Ravi Menon: Data and technology for climate action Keynote remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at COP26 Investor Action on Climate Webinar, 29 June 2021. * * * Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Why are we here? Three reasons: First, climate change is the defining crisis of our time – it is already happening, the worst is yet to come, and there is much at stake globally for lives and livelihoods. Second, finance has a key role to play in supporting the world’s transition to a greener and more sustainable trajectory. Third, to enable green finance flows and address climate related risks, we need trusted, timely, and relevant data. I take it we are all on the same page on the fact of climate change and the role of green finance, so let me focus on issues relating to data – which is a critical foundation for the green economy architecture the world needs to build. Financial institutions need accurate, granular data to assess and manage the environmental risks in their portfolios. What kind of data? For example: geographical, climate and weather-related data on their assets as well as along the supply chain; data on firms’ carbon footprint, historical carbon emissions, and pathways to reduce emissions over time; data on energy use and efficiency of physical assets, such as real estate; and data to monitor customers’ compliance to ESG standards and to measure the impact of transition activities on the climate.
The problem lies with its quality and productivity, which is insufficient to  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  support growth: a large amount of construction, not enough machinery and equipment nor research and development. Boosting productive investment is not something that can be decided from above: it depends on the decisions of thousands of entrepreneurs. But all are above all sensitive to three levers. First, growth prospects, since order books, i.e. expected demand or GDP, are the main drivers of investment. To raise medium-term growth in France, structural reforms are essential. Today we know France’s handicaps: a highly indebted public sector, declining competitiveness, unwieldy procedures. We also know the solutions: they have worked in other European countries, Sweden in the 1990s, Germany in the 2000s, Spain in the 2010s. The second lever is confidence. Uncertainty is the enemy of investment. To reduce uncertainty, rules should be simplified, stabilised and made more visible. Finally, the third lever is profitability. This factor has a more direct effect for many SMEs which are sensitive to the volume of their selffinancing. II. However, while firms’ investment decisions are mainly influenced by economic levers, financial levers also have an important role to play. a) Today, companies need more appropriate financing: our challenge concerns equity financing more than debt financing. In order to steer investments increasingly towards innovation, making them de facto more and more risky, financing has to evolve. Innovative investments call for new modes of financing.

François Villeroy de Galhau: Innovation and change Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the Annual Exchange Conference “Innovation and change”, Paris, 19 January 2016. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, It gives me great pleasure to respond to Stephane Boujnah’s invitation and take part in this annual conference, the subject of which is key to the French economy today. Our economy, which is at the frontier of technology, must be able to innovate continuously – and thus change – in order to improve its growth prospects. As a result, business investment, which is one of the keys to innovation, must be able to find new financing. This does not mean that traditional financing through bank loans is no longer necessary, far from it. It means that funding must become more diverse in order to meet companies’ financing needs, regardless of their size, age or sector. And of course, in this area, Euronext and the entire financial community have a vital role to play. But before addressing in more detail the financial levers of business investment, I would first like to talk about the economic levers that precede the need for financing. I. In economic terms, how are France and the euro area currently faring, and how can we move things up a gear?
We have communicated that we will take a meeting-by-meeting approach in assessing the appropriate next steps in monetary policy normalisation. As reiterated by President Lagarde at the European Parliament earlier this week, the direction of travel is clear, and we will raise rates further in the pursuit of our objective. This will avoid that our  1/3  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  monetary policy puts upward pressure on prices by sustaining demand when supply is constrained. It will also guard against the risk of a persistent upward shift in inflation expectations. At the same time, with many of the sources of today's inflation originating from supply constraints, government policies that redirect public and private investment to supporting sustainable growth can help mitigate inflationary pressures in the medium to longer term. In any case, these investments are crucial to achieving the EU's aim of meeting the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. As acknowledged in our monetary policy strategy, given the profound implications of climate change for price stability and its clear and unequivocal status as a policy priority for the EU, the ECB is committed to ensuring that we take climate change fully into account in the pursuit of our mandate. This is indeed a strategic commitment – it applies to every phase of the business cycle, irrespective of the type of shocks that hit the euro area. The same is true for our commitment to our price stability target.

In this regard, a number of developing economies in the region will need to further invest and upgrade their infrastructure to fully realise their growth potential. Infrastructure development generates employment, improves access to basic services and economic opportunities, promotes trade and investment, reduces the cost of doing business and encourages private sector development. It raises income and helps reduce poverty by spreading the benefits of growth more widely. The rising standard of living will in turn generate domestic demand, providing a new source of growth even as global demand continues to slow. ADB estimates that Asia needs as much as $ trillion in overall infrastructure investment between 2010 and 2020, with an average of $ billion in annual infrastructure spending. While the infrastructure needs are huge, Asia also has vast foreign reserves and private domestic savings. Traditionally, these savings have not been channelled to meet Asia’s own financing needs directly. Most of the savings have been invested in advanced economies before they are recycled back into the region. However, the global financial crisis has changed the landscape. Investors are increasingly looking to diversify their portfolio to this part of the world in the light of the faster growth and stronger fundamentals of the region. So there seems to be no lack of appetite to invest in Asia. The question is how to channel these funds to finance Asia’s infrastructure investment needs. Creating an enabling environment to facilitate private sector investment in infrastructure projects is crucial and fundamental.
It will also allow building quantitative benchmarks against which supervisors can test their banks. The Committee’s work on how banks calculate risk weighted assets also feeds into a broader concern that, in pursuit of risk sensitivity, the Basel III framework has grown too complex. There are many contributory factors to the build-up of complexity, including developments in the financial markets and adoption of sophisticated risk management practices by banks. It is naïve to think banks utilising complex trading strategies and products, across global markets, can be supervised using simple rules (even if calibrated to penal settings). Indeed, an important driver has been the necessity to address perverse incentives that are created by simple rules. So while seeking appropriate risk sensitivity, care is also being taken to ensure that complexity does not undermine the very benefits it offers. The Basel Committee has also been working during 2012 to review possible areas for simplification, aiming to strike a  6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  careful balance between risk sensitivity/complexity, comparability and simplicity. In the near term, the Committee intends to publish a paper to explain its thinking on the trade-offs that need to be made, and identifying potential ways to make the framework simpler and more comparable. Conclusion If there is one message I would like to leave you with it is that, when it comes to reform, ideas and implementation go together.

BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  •  there is a material variation in risk weights for trading assets across banks (after adjusting for accounting differences and for differences in the riskiness of different bank portfolios);  •  certain modelling choices seem to be major drivers of the variation in risk weights; and  •  the quality of existing public disclosure is generally insufficient to allow users to determine how much of the variation in reported risk weights is a reflection of underlying risk taking, and how much stems from other factors (eg modelling choices, supervisory discretions). In thinking about these results, it needs to be borne in mind that the objective is not to achieve zero variation. If we wished to achieve that outcome, we could simply force all banks onto the standardised approach to capital adequacy and remove any modelling options. But the standardised approach – while an ostensibly consistent methodology – would not necessarily guarantee a meaningful measure of risk when applied to the world’s largest banks with the biggest and most complex trading portfolios. Modelling necessarily introduces a degree of variability, since Basel standards deliberately allow banks and supervisors flexibility in order to accommodate for differences in risk appetite and local practices, but with the goal of also providing greater accuracy. Further, from a financial stability perspective, it is desirable to have some diversity in risk management practices so as to avoid that all banks act in a similar way.
SPEECH  The complexity of monetary policy Keynote speech by Fabio Panetta, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the CEPR-EABCN conference on “Finding the Gap: Output Gap Measurement in the Euro Area” held at the European University Institute Florence, 14 November 2022 The output gap – the difference between actual and potential output[1] – plays an important conceptual role in central banking. In normal conditions, the output gap represents a gauge of inflationary pressure by signalling the amount of slack in the economy. [2] In turn, this provides a yardstick against which central banks calibrate monetary policy. By steering demand so that actual output matches potential central banks can stabilise inflation around their targets. From the global financial crisis until the start of the pandemic, variations in the output gap reflected prominently the role played by demand factors. The implication for monetary policy was relatively straightforward. The shocks to demand pushed output, employment and inflation in the same direction, leading to a positive correlation between output gaps and inflation. Monetary policy could aim to close the inflation gap without facing major trade-offs in terms of the output gap. Central banks ultimately faced the difficulty, not so much of diagnosing, but of delivering: once inflation fell too low, their conventional instruments were constrained as interest rates approached their lower bound. [3] Central banks had to deploy non-standard policy tools to lift demand. Today we are in a new environment.

Nonetheless, while responsible finance has flourished in many local communities, its next phase of development requires responsible finance to be brought into the global mainstream, to become a core building block in our efforts towards forging a more sustainable financial architecture going forward. Similarly, decisions and solutions to finance need to also be considered on a global scale and not confined to any community or nation. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Of equal importance, the benefits of finance should be extended across all segments of society. Despite the size and scale of our financial sectors in the global financial system, many households and businesses still remain excluded from formal financial services. Globally, as many as 2 billion adults do not have access to a bank account . Perhaps even more revealing are the findings that financial exclusion is not limited solely to developing or low-income economies. Even in advanced countries such as Japan, 3.4% of adults remained financially excluded, while in the United States, over 8% of households are unbanked and 20% remain underbanked . There is thus a still much important impact that finance can bring about. Indeed, in various parts of the world, such greater access is already making a significant impact, particularly for small and medium enterprises, with its market size estimated to double to almost USD14 billion by 2019 from USD7 billion in 2015 . There is, however, still scope for such access to be expanded to bring about more balanced and sustainable growth in the global economy.
In such circumstances, the only way to maintain the competitiveness of the Macedonian producers was the specialization and exports of lower quality products. These developments did not generate inflationary pressures, which caused absence of real appreciation that was evident in the other transition countries. In the past several years, Macedonia is quickly moving closer to the more advanced transition economies. Several years in a row we have achieved positive and stable growth rates, equaling 5.1% in 2007, which is the highest growth rate since independence. Even though economic growth rates are lower than the ones in Baltic countries as well as some of the countries in the region, this is a sure sign for the acceleration of the process of real convergence. This process is also supported by the foreign direct and portfolio investments (6.3% of GDP in 2007) and the faster credit expansion, with annual growth rate of 39% in 2007. As far as nominal convergence is concerned, Macedonia is facing challenges that are common for most of the economies in the region and elsewhere. Since the last quarter of 2007, we are having an acceleration of the inflation rate, which is mostly caused by the global rise of food and energy prices. Therefore, the uncertainty regarding the movement of these prices, as well as the expectations for pressures initiated by the process of real convergence are the main challenges for monetary policy in the medium term.

The high quality of the speakers and the guests and the diversity of their background make me an optimist that we will have a fruitful Conference, which will broaden our knowledge with new experiences. I wish you a successful work in the Conference and to the representatives from abroad I wish a very pleasant stay in Macedonia. Thank you for your attention! BIS Review 74/2008  7
Fixed commitments in the form of wages, social transfers and interest on the public debt absorb more than two-thirds of the total. Furthermore, these expenditures are destined to grow autonomously. This is because, while the ongoing reduction in the public service headcount may restrain growth in wage costs, the impact of the slow pace of planned fiscal consolidation on the debt servicing burden and, in the longer term, of population ageing on the health and pensions budgets, cannot be easily avoided. In these circumstances, cutting the deficit while at the same time rebalancing the thrust of fiscal policy towards investment in growth-enhancing projects will be difficult. A determined effort must nevertheless be made. Areas which offer scope for rationalisation include health care and education, which have both been identified as producing relatively less efficient outcomes in terms of output compared with the EU average. Further savings could also be realised in the areas of social transfers to households and subsidies to enterprises. The latter are still equivalent to about 3 per cent of recurrent expenditure even after substantial recent cutbacks. Subsidies not only aggravate the fiscal burden, they also distort the price-signalling mechanism. The implications of this fiscal scenario are far reaching. Two recent reports, one by the Today Public Policy Institute and another by the European Commission, conclude that in the long run Malta’s welfare system is unsustainable.

It would appear, therefore, that as the economy responds to a gradual improvement in external demand, it may still be constrained by its own rigidities. Removing these obstacles and correcting the resultant imbalances is, therefore, a precondition for achieving more rapid growth, which in turn is the key to accelerating convergence with euro area income levels. 2  BIS Review 154/2009  Faster growth is achievable but depends on … The Roman writer Ovid said that times change and we change with them. That may be so, but what really matters in today’s circumstances is how rapidly we read the signs of the times and adapt to them. I will focus on three directions of necessary change. The first is towards greater competitiveness. The second, and related thrust, would be to promote higher productivity. The third focuses on fiscal consolidation and the pursuit of sound public finances. Before proceeding, however, I should stress that none of these objectives is attainable without further structural reforms, debunking the popular notion that the State has an unlimited capacity to satisfy demands for free goods and services and an end to inefficient practices that involve subsidies. … greater cost competitiveness … First of all, in Malta’s case sustained economic growth depends largely on our ability to attract export-oriented foreign direct investment. Given the past increases in unit labour costs, the only way of maintaining a competitive edge is by ensuring that these costs rise by less than those of our competitors.