samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In 2004, however, the krona did not appreciate to the same extent, but prices of imported goods continued to drop. To some extent this may reflect a lag in the pass-through of the krona’s appreciation but price developments for consumer goods in international markets have also been subdued during the recent economic slowdown. The weak imported inflation is also due in some measure to the fact that we have continually increased our share of imports from low-cost countries such as China and Poland. According to a first preliminary estimate by the Bank, this import switch to cheaper countries in general may have contributed to reducing the prices paid by Swedish importers by a couple of percentage points in 2004. This estimate is uncertain since in most cases there is no data available for how different trading-partner countries‘ export prices to individual recipient countries evolve, only their average export price. Nor is there data for our total imports from non-EU countries because all imports from these countries that reach Sweden via another EU country are registered in the statistics as imports from the EU. As a result, it is likely that this estimate does not measure the right price and probably underestimates the low-cost countries’ share of our total imports. So the effect of this import switch is probably somewhat understated. In the measure we currently use for international prices in our forecasting the concentration of low-cost countries is slightly smaller than that used in this estimate.

At present, the plethora of international meetings offers many chances to see the world, if not actually to save it. Ultimately, only the Bretton Woods institutions themselves – the IMF and the World Bank – have the legitimacy to represent all of their 187 member countries. But their governance is outdated. At the height of the crisis, the G20 and the G7 provided strong leadership. But legitimacy and leadership should go together. One without the other does not offer a sustainable vehicle for international cooperation. So allowing the G20 to metamorphose into the governing body of the IMF makes a good deal of sense. Such an evolution would, with a little commitment and imagination, create a single effective framework for international economic cooperation. And in the long run a more powerful and legitimate international body might be able to use its clout to deal with the imperfections and frictions that I have discussed. It might even be the vehicle for a more rules-based framework for the IMFS, based on a judgement about the sustainability of the pattern of world demand. Although that seems a distant prospect today, there is a precedent for a system of internalising cross-border externalities: the WTO already plays a similar role in international trade. So far, these rules have stood the test of time. Indeed, it is now more likely that protectionism would result from high unemployment, which the rules were not designed to prevent, than the pressures from producers which have been resisted. There is much to do.
Mugur Isărescu: 130th anniversary of the National Bank of Romania Speech by Mr Mugur Isărescu, Governor of the National Bank of Romania, at the Gala Concert of George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra, Bucharest, 5 September 2010. *  *  *  Mister President of Romania Your Excellencies Distinguished audience Dear guests and friends of the National Bank of Romania Please allow me to welcome Mr Jean Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank, our honoured guest here, at the Romanian Athenaeum, to the final act of our anniversary event. I would also like to greet President Ion Iliescu and Mr Emil Boc, the Prime Minister of Romania. I appreciate your honouring our invitation. My thanks go also to you all, governors, representatives of central banks and international financial institutions, and to all our Romanian and foreign guests. We are very happy to have you here with us this evening. We celebrate the 130th anniversary since the establishment of the National Bank of Romania, the 16th central bank in the world, according to the most widely accepted chronology. The birthday of our institution is on 29 April 1880, a day on which the Law on the establishment of the NBR was published in the Official Gazette. The commissioning of the Bank required a longer process that spanned over the entire 1880. On 5 September 1880 – precisely 130 years ago, the Bank’s Board held its first meeting.

Thank you very much. 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
Gent Sejko: Judging the progress achieved regarding reforms and economic policies Opening address by Mr Gent Sejko, Governor of the Bank of Albania, at the the presentation of the EBRD's Transition Report 2016-2017, Tirana, 27 January 2017. * * * Dear EBRD representatives, Dear participants, It is a special pleasure for us to host this event again and offer our cooperation for the presentation of the Transition Report 2016–2017, compiled by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. While only one year has passed since the last presentation, the challenges facing the global economy have been numerous. They are rather complex, creating the perception that we are before a new era. The existing problems, combined with the political, economic, and social developments in recent years, have contributed to the insofar convergence process. Nonetheless, the Transition Report evidences and documents, professionally and reliably, the economic, legal and institutional progress made in terms of transition and convergence, providing the appropriate space and priority for the future reforms. This is notably an independent assessment and a contemporary standard that helps us objectively judge on the progress achieved regarding reforms and economic policies implemented by the authorities in the relevant country. Figuratively, it sets the pace with which the society may assess the responsibility and accountability of the authorities to the public and the market. In this context, the report assesses as positive the reforms and economic policies undertaken by the Albanian authorities.

Regardless of our status – decision-makers, policy makers, researchers, academia or journalists – the report provides abundant information for furthering our analyses and conclusions. I invite you all to read it, and rationally and responsibly materialise its conclusions in your analyses for the present and the outlook of the economy. Thank you! 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
A more positive alternative is to mutualise debt with more robust countries: this is, of course, the post-war Marshall Plan, but it necessitates a global or European solidarity that is unfortunately uncertain. However we do it, we will have to bear higher public debts for longer, even though the burden will be lighter if interest rates remain very low. And this brings me to monetary policy. 3/ How to use monetary policy? Here again, let’s begin with what is most certain: inflation should remain weak during the period; it had already fallen to 0.6% in France and 0.7% in the euro area in March. Of course, supply is restricted; but demand will only recover gradually, and oil prices are expected to remain low. Therefore, over the long term the Eurosystem will have to contend with, if not necessarily a risk of deflation, then at least inflation that is too low for the definition of price stability (close to 2% over the medium term), especially given that annual inflation has been running at only 1.3% for a decade. This will thus mean that we not only have the possibility, but also the obligation to maintain very low interest rates and ample non-conventional instruments, including public and private sector purchase programmes, long into the future. This low inflation – particularly if it is persistent – is fuelling some far more speculative and complex thinking on post-crisis monetary policy.

The truth is that questions of European financial solidarity will mainly come in the post-crisis period, which I shall now address. 2.2 Initial strategic thinking on the post-crisis environment Beyond the present emergency and consensus, we must start to consider “postcrisis”. It raises some very open questions, some of which are premature. Let me begin, very simply, with what we know and what we do not know:  Page 5 of 8  We know that growth will be strongly negative in 2020, then positive in 2021. However, we do not know the numbers involved: they depend on the peak lockdown period – 1.5% of GDP is lost with every two weeks –, our ability to bounce back afterwards, and the chain of events with regard to public health and the economy in the rest of the world.  We now know that despite our initial hopes, we will not suddenly go from the current phase of general lockdown to a final phase of complete freedom of movement. Between, there will be a phase 2 of relative lockdown, which will gradually be wound down, potentially over a long period of time. However, we do not yet know how: this is where the interaction between the battle for public health and the battle for the economy will have to be optimised, and where public debate will have to bring together doctors and economists. Their opinions may converge more easily than we believe.
Explanations for the productivity puzzle based on crisis-related scarring are likely to be, at best, partial. Third, the productivity slowdown has been experienced by both advanced and emerging economies. The slowdown in median productivity growth after the 1970s among both advanced and emerging market economies is around 1¾ percentage points (Chart 8). Indeed, looking at country-specific trends, it is striking just how generalised the productivity slowdown has been (Chart 9). Fourth, one way of understanding this global productivity slowdown comes from decomposing it into changes in rates of innovation among countries operating at the productivity frontier and changes in rates of diffusion from frontier to non-frontier countries. Growth theory would predict that, over time, technological diffusion should lead to catch-up between frontier and non-frontier countries. 38  And the greater the distance to the  frontier, the faster these rates of catch-up are likely to be. So what explains the 1¾ percentage point slowdown in global productivity growth since the 1970s – slower innovation at the frontier or slower diffusion to the periphery? If the frontier country is taken to be the United States, then slowing innovation can only account for a small fraction of the global slowing, not least because the US only has about a 20% weight in world GDP. In other words, the lion’s share of the slowing in global productivity is the result of slower diffusion of innovation from frontier to non-frontier countries.

To illustrate that, Chart 10 plots the distribution of levels of productivity across countries over a set of sample periods, where productivity is measured relative to a frontier country (the United States) indexed to one. Comparing the distributions in the 1950s and 1970s, there is a clear rightward shift. Cross-country productivity convergence or catch-up was underway, as the Classical growth model would suggest. In recent decades, however, that pattern has changed. Comparing the 1970s with the 1990s, there is a small leftward shift in the probability mass. And in the period since the global financial crisis, there has been a further leftward shift in the distribution and a widening of its range. Today, non-frontier countries are about as far from the technological frontier as they were in the 1950s. Another way of illustrating the same point is by looking at differences in productivity between frontier and periphery countries over time (Chart 11). In the decades immediately following the Second World War, the Classical growth model was operating effectively, with catch-up in productivity underway and at faster rates among emerging market countries with furthest to travel to the frontier. 37 38  Gordon (2014). Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1992) and Rodrik (2011). 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  9  Since the 1980s, however, that convergence process appears to have stalled, perhaps even to have gone into reverse, in both advanced and emerging economies. The gap to the frontier has failed to close and, in particular for emerging market countries, has widened.
In February this year the interest rate was raised by a further quarter of a percentage point to 3.25 per cent. At the most recent monetary policy meeting on 3 May we decided to keep the repo rate unchanged. At the same time, our assessment was that the repo rate will need to be raised gradually, which we had also assumed earlier. Now we believe that it will need to be raised more than was anticipated in February. This is necessary so that inflation will develop in line with the target. The main reason why we need to revise our forecast upwards is the outcome of this year’s wage bargaining rounds. The central wage agreements have been slightly higher than we had earlier had reason to believe, given that unemployment is still quite high in Sweden. Some forecasters have believed in a higher interest rate path than we have predicted. However, this does not appear to be because their forecasts for wages or fiscal policy have differed substantially from those made by the Riksbank. I would also like to point out that so far there are no dramatic differences in our picture of current economic developments today compared with February. We will return to this in the Monetary Policy Report to be presented in June with a more detailed account of how we view the situation.

But one cannot rule out the possibility that it would have some effects on, for instance, consumption, and would thereby also contribute to strengthening demand, even if the effects were not substantial. The Riksbank and monetary policy The Riksbank’s task is to use all this information on what is happening in the Swedish economy and abroad to make a forecast of future inflation. The aim is normally to attain the inflation target within two years. The fact that we have this horizon is because monetary policy has an effect on economic developments after a time lag. We also want to have the opportunity to adjust the interest rate  BIS Review 54/2007  3  gradually to take into account developments in what economists call the real economy. This refers to basic economic concepts such as growth and employment. In the long run, monetary policy cannot affect either growth or employment. These are instead governed by factors such as population growth, technological developments and the way various markets function. But by setting the interest rate at the right level we can ensure that fluctuations due to variations in economic activity are slightly smaller. At the same time, we must not forget that the interest rate is a blunt instrument. It cannot be used to fine tune the economy. The development of the repo rate Last year we raised the repo rate by a total of 1.5 percentage points to 3.0 per cent.
Nonetheless, there may be policy “nudges” which might lower frictions, or sharpen incentives, in ways which could enhance the value already being created. Increasing visibility The key theme of this lecture is that the value created by volunteering is rarely wellmeasured or well-understood, especially when it comes to the wider social benefits. There is an information gap. This gap puts grit in all components of the volunteering machine, in ways which potentially inhibit its scale and effectiveness. Take volunteers themselves. Individuals’ behavioural biases lead them systematically to under-estimate the private benefits from philanthropy and volunteering. And state-of-the-art econometrics suggests these benefits may be substantial, the monetary equivalent of more than a month’s work for the average person. 30  For further details see http://www.ncvo.org.uk/practical-support. BIS central bankers’ speeches  11  One implication is that volunteering may be being systemically under-supplied relative to what even private individuals would desire. Or, put more positively, both individuals and society stand to gain from a better appreciation of these private benefits. This could be achieved through more research. But, perhaps more importantly, there may be a case for considering a public education programme which helped explain and popularise these benefits more widely. What is true of private benefits is true, perhaps to even greater extent, of societal gains.

As an additional way of sharpening incentives, individuals could be recognised or rewarded, locally or nationally, for passing certain volunteering milestones – 5,000 hours, 10,000 hours etc. If we wanted a more systematic way of calibrating the UK honours system, what better metric than the credit balance in an individual’s IVA? Conclusion So let me briefly sum up. Whether seen from an economic or social perspective, volunteering is big business, with annual turnover well into three-figure billions. But it is a well-hidden jewel, whose social worth is rarely the subject of a public valuation. One of the purposes of this lecture was to provide such a valuation, however imperfect. If the value of volunteering remains largely out of sight, it is likely also to remain out of mind. The potential economic and societal benefits from volunteering then risk remaining untapped. Yet with a nudge, that volunteer army could swell further. Indeed, I hope some of you here tonight might swell the ranks by signing-up to PBE as a volunteer. My message to you is that, by doing so, we – individually and societally – stand to receive. 38  Booth et al (2013).
The ADB, one of the sponsors of this forum, has played a vital role in nurturing growth and technical advances in Asian economies, and this role has in recent years both deepened, in the assistance it has been offering, and broadened in the geographical scope it has been covering. The ADB’ s joint sponsorship of this forum is one of many examples of the good work it is doing to address regional concerns. The co-sponsor of the forum, the Institute of International Finance (IIF), has, in two timely and important reports issued in March this year, argued strongly for private-sector, as well as publicsector, initiatives to address global financial crises. The co-sponsors have brought together a diverse and experienced forum of participants from private-sector and public-sector organisations, all of which have a large stake in ensuring that our regional and global financial systems work properly. The Hong Kong Experience As a regional and international financial centre, Hong Kong’s livelihood depends, perhaps to a greater extent than other economies, on the proper functioning of the international financial system. Our stake in this, arguably, is larger than other economies. This perhaps explains why we seem to have been quite forthcoming, in both our views and our actions, on issues affecting international monetary and financial stability. This unusual stance has caused some controversy, particularly when we intervened last summer in the stock and futures markets to deter market manipulation and correct market failure.

At the end of discussions, the Supervisory Council decided to keep the key interest rate unchanged, at 2.75%. This policy will help provide the requisites for complying with the inflation target and is consistent with our projections for inflation rates returning within the target band in the medium term. In this context, I avail myself of this opportunity to underline that the Bank of Albania expects a better response by the banking system with regard to lending. This response should take into account, among others, the positive prospective of economic development in Albania and the stimulating policies applied by the Bank of Albania. Based on the available information, the Bank of Albania deems that expected economic and financial development requires maintaining the easing monetary policy stance in the quarters ahead. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
These firms are able to obtain funding on more attractive terms because debt holders expect that the government will intervene rather than allow failure. This creates an incentive to get large to achieve such status, not because it facilitates greater efficiency, but instead because the implicit government backstop enables the too-big-to-fail firm to achieve lower funding costs. Although the United States has an effective resolution mechanism for commercial banks, we do not yet have a good resolution scheme for large non-banking institutions or bank holding companies with large international operations. To address the too-big-to-fail problem, we need to develop a truly robust and credible resolution mechanism that allows for the orderly wind-down of any institution – regardless of its size – and that limits the contagion to the broader financial system. This will require not only domestic legislation, but also extensive work internationally to address a range of legal issues involved in winding down a major global firm. I want to emphasize how important it is that the incentives we embed within the regulatory apparatus for financial intermediaries encourage the type of behavior we seek – behavior consistent with safety and soundness and financial stability. For example, consider the efforts underway to standardize OTC derivatives and move the clearing of such trades to central counterparties (CCPs). These are good and worthwhile efforts.

Similarly, involvement in the supervisory process gives us critical information in fulfilling our lender-of-last-resort responsibilities. Information sharing with other agencies is simply not as good as the intimate knowledge and understanding of markets and institutions that is gathered on a first-hand basis. Indeed, many institutions at the center of the crisis and arguably the most troubled – Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG and the government-sponsored enterprises – were not supervised by the Federal Reserve. Consequently, when those institutions came under stress, the Federal Reserve had poorer quality and far less timely information about the condition of these institutions than would have been the case if we had had the benefit of direct supervisory oversight. Let me now shift gears and turn to the two macroeconomic policy issues: fiscal sustainability and balanced global economic activity. The deep downturn in economic activity has led to a sharp deterioration in the fiscal condition of many countries – the United States is no exception. The problem is not so much that the economic downturn has caused large budget deficits to open up – this always happens when a decline in economic activity leads to a sharp drop in revenue and increased spending on the safety net – but instead is more due to the fact that these deficits generally have a very large structural component.