samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The right hand panel, which describes the situation in recent years, after the Great Financial Crisis, shows that Asian economies are much closer to the regression line than they were in the 1990s. This looks encouraging in terms of balanced growth. One caveat, however, is that Asian dots are located closer to the zero-vertical line as well: total factor productivity growth is generally lower than it was in the 1990s. In other words, economic growth appears to be more balanced, but it may have also lost some strength. This is a bit disturbing because population aging is about to accelerate in some countries, with stronger demographic headwinds therefore to be expected. Remember that once a country falls into demographic onus, it needs to offset negative demographic forces with higher growth in total factor productivity just to maintain per capita growth, and hence living standards. This is exactly why total factor productivity growth is the crucial issue for a number of Asian economies. The next question then is, how do we raise total factor productivity growth? The answer may be a pessimistic one if we think that productivity growth is only exogenously determined. If this is the case, all we can do is hope that some exogenous shock, or just pure luck, will raise productivity. We would have to admit that there is an element of truth in this explanation if we look at the history of prosperous cities, as highlighted by Enrico Moretti, an expert in urban economics.

The traditional European holidaymakers, however, continue to change their money into Swiss francs. 2  BIS Review 73/2002  In practice, most businesses apply the current rate plus a margin of 2%-3% when payment is made in euros. The majority of businesses only accept euro banknotes and return change in Swiss francs; a minority also accept euro coins, giving the change in euros. The management of coins is made more difficult because most banks do not buy or sell coins. All businesses queried feel that the simplification brought about by the replacement of the former European currencies with the single currency is positive. With regard to the euro as deposit money, many export companies switched to billing in euros relatively soon after the introduction of the single currency. Consequently, this practice has not become significantly more prevalent in the most recent past. Invoicing in euros of exports destined for the euro zone is widespread. Producers of some niche and luxury products are an exception. They continue to bill in Swiss francs. Euro-denominated receipts are hedged in exceptional cases only; companies still consider hedging on the financial markets to be too expensive. What is widely practised, however, is so-called “natural hedging”, which means that receipts in euros are used to settle suppliers' invoices: primary products and raw materials from the euro zone are paid for in euros. Swiss suppliers have increasingly been requested to provide euro-denominated invoicing. It is unclear to what extent inter-company payments in Switzerland are effected in euros.
The efforts seem to have already paid off – the year 2013 marked a turnaround in Romania’s economic development: economic growth of 3.5% driven mostly by robust export and industrial output on the supply side; a small current account deficit; historically low inflation; while the fiscal deficit was kept well below 3%. And I have every reason to believe that Romania will see further growth in the years to come. And that, unlike in the pre-crisis period, this time sustainability will be the name of the game, as hopefully we all have learned our lessons from our previous mistakes. As they say, no one really learns but from his own mistakes…  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Talking about sustainable economic growth, one needs to put things into perspective in order to ascertain whether the economy is on the right track. This means that short-term policies must be harmonised with the long-term vision and goals. Euro adoption could serve as such a long-term goal. And Romania has chosen to use it as an anchor. Let me say a few words about this subject. In the post-crisis period, all non-euro area EU countries in Central and Eastern Europe with floating exchange rate regimes (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania), as well as Bulgaria, shifted to a wait-and-see approach as regards euro adoption, even though, in some of them, Maastricht criteria were already fulfilled or within reach.

At the recent release of the 2018 Financial Stability and Payment Systems Report, Bank Negara Malaysia reported that financial institutions in Malaysia will continue to support economic activity, including to households for affordable housing. Loan disbursements and net financing to households grew healthily last year by around 6.7% and 4.7% respectively. The approval rate stood at 71.3%, with around 70% of loans for first time buyers of properties priced below RM500,000. Finally, for policymakers, our role is to continue pursuing greater coordination with the private sector to build a sustainable housing market. In Malaysia, various initiatives have been announced to support this agenda, including the launch of Bank Negara Malaysia’s Fund for Affordable Homes, the National Home Ownership Campaign, stamp duty exemptions and provision of mortgage guarantees and rent-to-own schemes. While we are seeing a gradual rebalancing of housing supply towards the more affordable segments in Malaysia, it is important that future supply is tailored to the needs of future demand. As such, moving forward, it will be critical for Malaysia to accelerate the establishment of an integrated housing database. The database would be important to provide timely information to help build an efficient housing market through greater transparency and lead to better planning by policymakers and developers. The newly established single authority for affordable housing should play a proactive and strategic role in managing affordable housing in Malaysia. Local authorities and developers should also work together to reduce the cost of building houses.
improved economic confidence following the attainment of the enhanced HIPC Initiative Completion Point in April 2005, which resulted in reduced external debt service obligations, and;  v.  increased foreign direct and portfolio investment, reflecting increased market confidence in the economy stemming from the greatly improved prospects for the copper sector, the cancellation of the bulk of Zambia’s external debt, and the continued commitment to prudent fiscal and monetary policies. Mr Chairman, all these factors have accounted for the current strengthening of the Kwacha. This has led to an outcry from some of our exporters of nontraditional commodities that they are losing external competitiveness and may close down their businesses. While I appreciate this outcry, I wish to state that the exchange rate alone does not determine external competitiveness of exports. Exporters should look at those areas in their production processes where they can attain efficiency gains and improve productivity. Besides the appreciation of the Kwacha which has an impact on inflation is beneficial to non-traditional exporters in several ways: •  reducing cost of capital goods  •  reducing cost of imported raw materials  •  reducing cost of freight/fuel  On its part, the Government can assist this process by directing investment in infrastructure and structural reforms, including labour laws, so as to reduce the cost of doing business in Zambia. Mr Chairman, in the Government securities market, developments in yield rates were mixed in 2005.

Ravi Menon: Singapore's FinTech journey - where we are, what is next Speech by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the Singapore FinTech Festival - FinTech Conference, Singapore, 16 November 2016. * * * Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to the inaugural Singapore FinTech Festival. We have more than 11,000 participants from more than 50 countries, attending one or more of the many events lined up over these five days. Technologies Transforming Finance Financial technology or FinTech is transforming financial services, in a way not seen before. We have unprecedented mobility. The smartphone is becoming our bank. People can consume financial services on the go. We have unprecedented connectivity. The Internet has compressed time and space. Interaction is real-time and unconstrained by physical boundaries. We have unprecedented computing power. The devices in our hands or on our wrists are literally pokemons – pocket-sized monsters that pack more data and more processing power than super computers just a couple of decades ago. Digital payments are becoming more widespread, propelled by advances in near-field communications, identity authentication, digital IDs, and biometrics. Blockchains or distributed ledgers are being tested for a wide variety of financial operations, to make them faster, more robust, more efficient: to settle interbank payments; to verify and reconcile trade finance invoices; to execute, enforce, and verify the performance of contracts; to keep an audit trail and deter money laundering. Perhaps the biggest potential is in what is called Big Data.
The growth and integration of financial and capital markets has been even more spectacular, especially over the past 20 years. Financial openness – defined as the ratio of external assets and liabilities to GDP - has risen seven-fold for both groups of countries. Second, the dramatic rise of new economic powers has been simultaneously adding to global productive capacity, and changing the balance of world trade and economic activity. The entry of China, India and Eastern Europe into the global market economy has effectively doubled the world’s supply of labour. The sheer scale and speed of economic development in China alone has been quite without precedent. After 25 years of double-digit growth, it is now the world’s fourth largest economy, having overtaken the UK this year. Its share of world trade has more than doubled over the past decade, making it the third largest trading country behind the US and Germany. Increasingly, a small group of industrialised countries will no longer dominate the world economy in the way they did 30 years ago. Measured at market exchange rates, the G7 still accounts for 60% of world output. But if current growth differentials persist, this share will fall to 40% within the next 20 years. And if output is measured using purchasing power parities – to give a higher, and arguably more accurate, weight to relatively cheap non-traded goods and services in emerging markets - the G7 world share has already fallen to that level. Emerging markets are already a major force in the world economy.

This brings me to the crux of the matter: can IMF surveillance really make much difference, even if it is reformed in the way I have described? It is important to recognise that surveillance - especially multilateral surveillance - is a very different kind of activity from the monitoring of reform programmes that may be linked to Fund financial assistance packages. Lending programmes have exerted considerable apparent leverage over countries’ behaviour at least in the short term, through so called ‘conditionality’. In recent years the Fund’s lending activities have gone into steep, and possibly irreversible, decline. But leverage of this kind has never been available to force policy change on countries who do not borrow from the Fund, a category which for the past 25 years has included all large industrialised countries. The ‘traction’ of surveillance depends critically on the Fund’s ability to influence the policies that countries choose to pursue. But is it realistic to suppose that the Fund can any have real influence over the countries whose policies matter most? The Fund’s constitution is cast in terms of the obligations that members owe to each other and to the Fund. Such obligations are not without legal content, still less without value. But the effectiveness of  6  BIS Review 103/2006  surveillance cannot rest on the strength or otherwise of any treaty-based sanctions that might be used against members who fail to meet their obligations.
Those minority votes, however, were the expression of modest differences in the timing of interest rate changes. The MPC was tightening policy over that period – from the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007 – and I was in support of the broad strategy of gradual tightening that was being pursued. And I continued to support the broad strategy of the majority of the Committee as we relaxed policy – gradually at first, and then more dramatically from October 2008 onwards. So until I started to express my dissenting votes to raise rates last summer, I felt that my views were relatively close to the majority on the Committee and differences of view were mainly tactical – relating to the timing of Bank Rate changes. I now feel somewhat differently about my position relative to the policy which the majority of the MPC has supported over the past year. Even though my position on interest rates has gathered support in recent months, it is nearly a year since I started to vote for a gradual rise in the UK Bank Rate, in response to a recovering economy and rising inflation. I don’t think such a persistent difference of view with the majority on the Committee can be described as tactical. It reflects significantly different views on the outlook for inflation and growth in the UK and how we should respond as a monetary authority.

The lessons learned from the Great Depression and the commitment on the part of policymakers around the world to ensure that the misery that it caused will not replicate itself this time have prevented the current situation from causing even more severe disruptions. One particular aspect of the current crisis has been the synchrony among different countries. The financial earthquake that devastated developed markets last September and October and its aftershocks that swept over the financial systems of every economy, over output prospects in the world, over income and wealth, just to name a few, propagated to expectations which deteriorated across the entire world. The Chilean economy has not been absent to this phenomenon. As we said in the very beginning, our economy is not and cannot be immune. You can see it in the latest figures and projections contained in this Monetary Policy Report. The channels and mechanisms through which the crisis is transmitted to our economy are varied, and the severe international shock that hit us during the fourth quarter of last year has had damaging repercussions locally, even more so than we foresaw in January. A question that arises naturally is, why the big impact on our economy? Unfortunately, no single answer exists and only time and the gathering of information will allow us more certainty.
The fiscal leeway for the most heavily indebted countries is limited and confidence in reforms has weakened, forcing them to implement austerity measures more rapidly. A common feature of the countries that fared well through the financial crisis was that they had kept their house in order. A long-term economic policy anchor provided latitude to use fiscal policy actively when this became necessary. The economies that fared well had also kept price and cost inflation under control in the years prior to the crisis. Norway falls into this group, even though our abundant natural resource wealth puts us in an exceptional situation. Economic policy guidelines Today we can look back at ten years of inflation targeting and the fiscal rule. Despite the financial crisis, this has been a golden period for Norway. Economic developments in Norway have been influenced by changes in global trade patterns, which I have described in brief. Asia has replaced Europe as our main trading partner for many goods, and the price of our exports has risen at a markedly faster pace than the price of our imports. National income is almost 30 per cent higher in real terms than ten years ago. EU enlargement provided us with access to a larger labour market and Norway’s population has grown faster than for many years. Unemployment has been low – close to an average 3 per cent through the decade. Chart 4: CPI and CPIXE. 12-month percentage change, 5-month moving average. January 2001 – December 2010 CPI inflation has varied to some extent.

Journal of Political Economy 85: 473–492. 2  The advantage of tying oneself to economic policy objectives does not conflict with the ability of economic policy to stabilise the economy at the same time. On the contrary, a credible commitment to objectives can provide greater leeway for stabilising the economy. See, for example, Michael Woodford (2003) “Interest and Prices”, Princeton University Press. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  The clearest expression of this lesson was found in monetary policy. In Norway, the authorities set an objective for the value of the krone, but devalued when the krone came under pressure. The devaluations were over time incorporated into expectations and inflation surged. It is tempting to quote Hermod Skånland, who stated that Norway “early and with great perspicacity” charted a course for economic policy – and thereafter promptly embarked on a different path. 3 During the upturn in the mid-1980s, the interest rate was held low and public spending was high. The economy became vulnerable. When oil prices fell in 1986, a change of course became imperative. All efforts were concentrated on bringing public spending under control. Interest rate setting was geared towards maintaining a steady krone exchange rate. The aim was to bring down inflation close to the level prevailing in other countries. The banking crisis and the downturn in the early 1990s led to renewed recognition that market forces had to be controlled and banks regulated. An approach based on broad economic policy cooperation was pursued.
Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Improving and expanding Malaysia’s cross-border financial flows and capital market transactions Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Official Launch of the Expansion of SWIFT Office in Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, 24 November 2014. *  *  *  It is my pleasure to be here today on the occasion of the opening of this expanded SWIFT Kuala Lumpur Corporate Services Centre. We are most honoured with the presence of Her Royal Highness Princess Astrid of Belgium. Allow me to, first of all, welcome Her Royal Highness Princess Astrid of Belgium. It is also my pleasure to welcome His Excellency Didier Reynders, Federal Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Affairs of Belgium, and His Excellency Pieter De Crem, Federal Secretary of State for Foreign Trade of Belgium to Kuala Lumpur. It is my honour to address such a distinguished gathering including the practitioners from the financial fraternity. We are pleased to welcome the expansion of the SWIFT office in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia has aspired to be an important destination for international corporations and organisations to operate in. Malaysia has well-developed infrastructure, a dynamic workforce and costcompetitive environment to provide an enabling environment for mutually reinforcing benefits. Malaysia is now home to more than 5,000 foreign companies from more than 40 countries. Additionally, it also includes global and regional shared services hubs that serve worldleading financial services providers and international corporations.

The other attraction of using the approach taken for the SMCR for future regulation is that it has been the preferred approach adopted by Parliament most recently when not constrained by EU regulation (for the rollout of the SMCR to insurers, which occurred in December 2018). This is an important consideration at a time of heightened debate, in a Brexit context, about so-called “Henry VIIIth” and “Cardinal Wolsey” powers. Although it is uncertain quite what those gentlemen’s views would have been on the output floor in Basel 3.1, my point is that making use of an approach recently chosen by Parliament seems to me to have considerable attractions relative to choosing something completely new and untested. Would it not, though, be easier and better simply to stick with the EU model through which we have recently imported a large volume of rules? This approach is radically different from the approach the UK has taken when left to its own devices. Indeed, the EU model, with a large body of technical rules set out in the equivalent of primary legislation, is quite different from how most of the world does it. For example, the EU and Switzerland were the only two members of the Basel Committee on Banking Standards where Basel 3 was implemented through primary legislation rather than the prudential authority’s rule-making powers – in major economies like the US, Australia and Canada the regulators did the implementation.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Update on the Singaporean economy Statement by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, delivered at the MAS Annual Report 2000/2001 media conference in Singapore on 12 July 2001. * 1  *  *  Introduction  MAS has had an eventful year, shaping monetary policy in a challenging and uncertain environment and continuing to liberalise and enhance standards in the financial sector. 2  Monetary policy  In January this year, MAS decided to maintain the existing exchange rate policy stance of allowing a modest appreciation of the trade-weighted Singapore dollar within an unchanged policy band. This policy was aimed at capping medium-term inflationary pressures, while continuing to be supportive of economic activity as growth came off its cyclical high and moderated to a slower pace. Economic activity slowed much more in the first half of 2001 than was expected, causing market sentiment to shift against the Singapore dollar. Strong demand for US dollars to fund merger and acquisition activities by domestic corporates, and a strengthening of the US dollar against the major currencies, exerted further downward pressure on the Singapore dollar. The $ weakened over the period, from the top of the policy band at the start of the year to the lower half of the band at end June. This trend was consistent with the change in underlying economic and market conditions.

In that sense, the ECB’s response with unconventional measures is completely logical. When unconventional measures are applied, it is normal to have different views about their effect, including the possibility of a “Japanese” scenario. It would be wrong, however, to put the focus solely on monetary policy without taking into account what is being or not being done to address the global economic uncertainty, and also in the areas of structural reforms and fiscal policy. You have said many times that in order to be effective, the politicians’ attempts to stimulate the economy must be aimed at structural areas, like the labour market, pension reforms and education. What room for action do Bulgarian politicians have when these three areas are concerned? Do you believe that there are unused opportunities? Such opportunities exist, but they are associated with complex and sometimes time-consuming measures. They are not limited only to the labour market, pension reforms and education, but also extend to areas like health care, defence, the modernization of the technical and social infrastructure. Some steps in these fields require serious public resources. It is a good sign that they are implemented within an overall disciplined fiscal framework. Quite a few economists say that the 2% inflation goal, set by the ECB, is a thing of the past given the ageing population and structurally transforming technologies. Do you believe there are grounds to correct this goal? 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  There are grounds to conduct a strategic review of the monetary policy’s goals.