bank. our experience, as worldwide, confirmed that this is where the cooperation between the central bank and other regulatory bodies becomes a necessity, but even more so, good statistics and inter - agency exchange of information and data sharing becomes a priority. let me point out that macedonia did not experience significant damage in the crisis period, since the structure of the financial system is very traditional ( the mfi subsector holds almost 90 % of total assets ), as well as conservative in terms of the financial instruments employed ( mainly deposits and credits ). nevertheless, the financial stability analysis scrutinizes the risks in all financial institutions, and conveys inter - sectoral contagion analysis to assess possible spillover effects in case of a shock. the central bank cooperates very closely with other regulatory bodies through the financial stability committee, and the cooperation has intensified in the last couple of years, spreading to statistical data collection as well. in 2014, bilateral agreements with all regulatory bodies for ofis have been amended encompassing securities statistics, arranging data sharing and streamlining the data collection for the needs of the national bank through the regulators, enabling parallel access to the data, as well as increased quality controls in the process of data collection, and above all overcoming confidentiality issues. the other side of the coin is that enhanced data sets pose some challenges. more frequent granular data increases the reporting burden of the industry, but also the burden of the statisticians. this further underlines the need for “ merit and cost ” procedure and reinvestigating the potential of data sharing among domestic or international institutions, which brings us to the issue of comparability and possibility of using the similar data sets for different purposes. better cooperation among regulatory agencies may help in this regard. the switch from “ aggregate statistics ” to granular multi - purpose statics requires adequate statistical resources including it infrastructure and tools to process and present data in a meaningful form for the policymakers, as they should be able to see the wood and not be lost among the trees. the extensive production and usage of individual, micro data raises an important question on the data security and data confidentiality issues. so far, we have seen that it can be an important constraint both for statistics, but also for the analytical work. knowing that the data are available in the system, but restricted for use, is very often a reality in our day - to - day work. i think that a stronger international initiative and joint effort of the statistics community as well

. these were identified as segments that on a longer term can support the external position of the economy. in addition, measures were undertaken, supportive to the financing of the corporate sector through the issuance of longer - term debt securities, as alternative source of financing. in general, innovations in monetary frameworks and instruments go hand in hand with innovations in statistics. the non - standard measures underline a need to devise a specific dataset, produced on a regular basis, for monitoring the effectiveness of the measures undertaken. the financial crisis has underpinned the importance of the financial stability, which forced many central banks to place much higher priority to the financial stability concerns. the focus has shifted from the stability and risks pertaining to individual financial institution to the systemic risk concept. in other words, what matters evenly is the potential instability of the financial system as a whole, and the risk of adverse loops with the real sector. more importantly, the crisis has stressed the time dimension of the systemic risk that is the procyclicality of the financial behavior and the structural dimension, which arises from the interconnectedness among the financial institutions and the possible contagion effects. hence, the macro prudential analysis and measures are gaining more and more weight, and so are the new datasets requirements for pursuing the macro prudential role. i think that even prior to global crisis, central banks were well equipped with a wide range of macroeconomic, monetary and financial data. what was probably missing was a wellestablished platform for pursuing strong macro - financial analysis, higher frequency of some of the indicators, and uniformity in the way indicators were calculated. even more, again the usage of granular, micro data on individual financial institutions was a weak link, precluding the identification of potential interlinkages and contagion effects needed for the macro prudential analysis. the exploration of micro data on the borrowers was also a missing element, which at certain point could be an important tool for assessing the potential risks to financial stability and stability of the economy in general. the g20 data gap initiative is probably one of the most systematic approaches, which could provide a general stocktaking and monitoring of the progress in terms of the “ missing data ” for financial stability purposes. the build - up of risks in the financial sector was an area, where the crisis pinpointed the need to create or enhance the data coverage. it was acknowledged that more efforts are needed in the area of capturing enough wide