once european states had decided to go in the direction of a monetary union, the point was not only to put some people together in a room to take decisions but to enable that group of people to take good and transparent decisions. in view of the different cultural backgrounds, different operational and institutional frameworks were underpinned by different data requirements. with a common policy making - set - up what would be the statistical adjustment requirement? the only way forward was to establish a common framework for existing statistics as well as developing a set of new statistics. this work started well before the start of monetary union and there still remains room for improvement. in this regard, i would like to highlight the important work done by the european system of statistics. so, faced with a new type of user requirements ( i. e. monetary policy for what is at present a monetary union of soon 13 countries ), the european statistical system ( ess ) and the european system of central banks ( escb ) statistical services successfully established the needed statistical framework. it was therefore important to define a set of harmonised data to be collected by the respective national authorities, be they central banks or national statistical institutes, in all of the euro area member countries. at the same time it should be highlighted that most of these national institutions already collected data for their own national needs and that the development of the euro - zone statistical needs did not necessarily offset the national statistical requirements designed for and evolved in a national policy - making environment. in this regard, it may be pointed out that part of the existing national and euro area statistical needs are unfortunately not totally coherent reflecting the transfer of monetary policy making to the higher european level while retaining other areas of economic policy at the national level. in this regard, i strongly urge users of statistics i. e. policy makers as well as compilers to reflect on the fact that reacting to changing societies does not only imply the development of new statistics but also a strong reflection on the need to maintain currently available “ old ” statistics. this phenomenon probably reflects the inertia of existing institutions and the resistance of national bureaucracies to transferring competences to the supranational level. very often these needs are defined without consultation of other institutions already collecting data, or there is consultation, but minor differences concerning the data needs used to collect different sets of data persist. what would be better would be to try to overcome these differences and to collect a single set. a single set might not be perfect for all the

regulators concerned but it would be adequate and cost less. economic and financial evolution during the debt crisis in latin america in the late 1980's, most of the actors involved had to accept the fact that they had been surprised by the crisis. in the aftermath of the crisis, the imf decided to introduce a new data standard, the special data dissemination standard, in order to collect additional information on the situation of its member countries and to publish this information much faster than it had been done in the past. this new data requirement was felt necessary since it is supposed to better inform economic actors and therefore create an early warning system for financial crises. the “ new economy ” and its important productivity gains due to information technologies generated the need for more detailed data concerning prices – for instance hedonic prices to capture ever faster changes. the present crisis in the american mortgage market will also call for additional information. indeed financial innovation supposed to spread risk and thus liberate capital and increase liquidity was found not to be stress resistant. credit risk transfer with increased complexity and dissemination in parallel decreased both access to information and the exercise of due diligence. the lack of transparency triggered a wave of mistrust impairing the proper functioning of whole segments of financial markets. it had been expected that the generalized phenomenon of the mispricing of assets had its origin in some institutional developments such as hedge funds or private equity and increased disclosure was requested in this direction. however, the unfolding of the turbulence identifies a lack of transparency associated with the “ originate and distribute ” model, the role of rating agencies and the limits to the supervisory boundaries. the foreseeable response will be more disclosure, better information and increased statistical coverage. in all, greater transparency. exogenous factors the terrorist attacks on 11 september 2001 were also at the beginning of additional information needs. in the recent past, the us customs have requested more private information from people travelling into the usa and most countries are now introducing new biometric passports. in the same vein, the united - states, in the war against terror, requested as much information as possible about financial transactions in order to reduce the financing of terrorists. hence, they obtained access to additional and mainly very confidential information on financial transactions worldwide through swift. where is the end? will we continuously increase data needs or are there limits? there are at least two limits. • data production generates costs the increasing data requests on the part of regulators generate increased production costs and therefore decreases competitiveness.