an extraordinary lack of common rules at the global level, in particular in the field of financial stability. in this regard, a concrete outcome has been the collective acknowledgement that the financial markets need rules. and that as a result of the ever increasing globalisation of markets, national practices need to be set aside to make way for new and, to the extent possible, common rules. major steps have been taken in recent years to strengthen the financial system, both at the european and the global level, in the interests of and in order to protect savers and investors. both the g20 and the financial stability board have taken on greater importance and have proven to constitute – together with the international monetary fund – a useful mechanism for brokering agreement on the launching of an agenda for necessary reforms. allow me to mention, in particular, the work carried out by the financial stability board – the organisation over which i had the honour of presiding between 2006 and 2011 – on the regulation of the financial markets. the board has put forward proposals on how to reinforce banks ’ capital without putting their fundamental role in the real economy at risk ; on how to reduce the risk of moral hazard for systemically important financial institutions ( those that are “ too big to fail ” ) ; on how to increase transparency in financial markets ( in particular in derivatives ). even matters relating to accounting standards have not been overlooked : significant efforts have been made to increase the comparability of methods and concepts at the international level. also with regard to europe, significant progress has been made but much still remains to be done, particularly in relation to devising a new institutional structure for the euro area aimed at creating the necessary conditions for long - lasting prosperity for all countries in the area. it is clear, however, that we must move towards greater economic integration among the countries which share the euro. no union can be based on the assumption that a country can cause “ externalities ” and economic damage to other member countries by pursuing its own national economic policy priorities. within the european monetary union, progress needs to be made in three areas : budgetary policy, structural reforms and financial market regulation. with regard to budgetary policies r. emmett taylor, no royal road : luca pacioli and his times, the university of north carolina press, 1942. bis central bankers ’ speeches and those aimed at strengthening the flexibility and productivity of the weakest economies, it is vital that there be real multilateral surveillance. the necessary solidarity between economies and countries which share

and goes beyond the rubric of a traditional central bank. we have the primary responsibility of compilation of banking and financial statistics as well as balance of payments statistics. we have also been compiling corporate finance statistics. we have been keenly aware of the need to constantly improve the statistics in terms of coverage, quality, frequency and level of dissemination. we participate and generally conform to the various international standards such as the imf ’ s sdds and the bis data bank programme. we have been a part of the g20 data gap initiative that has identified a number of new areas for data collection. let me now turn to some of the recent initiatives. first, our banking statistics coverage extends beyond the standard monetary and regulatory attributes to cover socio - economic dimensions. we maintain a database of the vast branch network of commercial banks. we have recently provided on our website a facility of bank branch locator which is a dynamic tool giving information on various characteristics of bank branches such as location and population group. second, our recent efforts on data dissemination include : introduction of a user - friendly data warehouse interface with dashboards and time - series formatted reports ; bringing out several regular statistical publications directly from the data warehouse, and updating them almost on a real - time basis ; dissemination of information through web - publication as the initial point and its synchronisation with the data released on dbie ; and advances in integration of xbrl bis central bankers ’ speeches data collection system directly with data warehouse to eventually replace all existing standalone data compilation systems. third, a significant recent achievement on external accounts statistics was our contribution to the co - ordinated direct investment survey ( cdis ) of the imf. this large database provides information on country - wise inward and outward direct investment. on the balance of payments ( bop ) statistics, we have implemented the sixth edition of imf ’ s manual, ahead of many advanced economies. fourth, the reserve bank conducts several quarterly forward - looking sample surveys in the areas of industrial outlook, consumer confidence and inflation expectations to aid monetary policy making. the results of these surveys are now disseminated in public domain simultaneously with our quarterly report on macroeconomic and monetary developments accompanying the monetary policy statement. fifth, we have expanded the coverage of our house price index ( hpi ) based on transaction prices obtained from housing registration authorities to nine cities from seven cities. we expect to add four more cities this year. in parallel, we are developing an asset price monitoring system ( apms