##ifiers, and a role for authorities in helping develop those standards, is far from new. let me give a recent example. one major lesson from the great financial crisis was the need to be far better at identifying the many entities and organisations operating within the financial system. when the crisis hit, the lack of any uniform international method of identifying the huge number of legal entities scattered across the world added to the crippling uncertainty over who owed what to whom. we all remember that uncertainty causing panic on the financial markets. so was born the legal entity identifier, or lei – a 20 - character alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies a legally distinct entity. it allows data relating to a single bank, insurer or whoever, to be combined. over one and a half million entities in over 200 countries have now registered for an lei. and it has had a wide range of benefits. it has supported the portability of data between organisations. it has aided the fight against money laundering. and it has been helpful in our data collections : for example, when we ask firms to submit counterparty exposure data to us, it provides a clear way for us to compile data about each entity. so the lei is a growing success. but it also demonstrates that the adoption of standards is a long journey, with a continued need for public sector involvement. the g20 endorsed the lei system as a global standard back in 2012. it has come a long way since then, but it still has further to go, and we will continue to support it. its adoption so far has in part been due to the push from regulators, but it needs to be used by a wider set of participants – we at the bank are continuing to support that wider uptake, including for corporates beyond the financial sector. it needs to be included in new areas such as payment messages – we will soon be mandating the use of leis in payments through our chaps system. more broadly, lei systems and processes need to continually evolve to ensure they can meet the demands of a digital world. all speeches are available online at www. bankofengland. co. uk / news / speeches and @ boe _ pressoffice the lei shows that standards take time to be designed, refined and adopted, and so reaping their benefits requires patience and persistence. that will be the case for our collective journey, too. our approach to developing standards so how do we plan to go about expanding and improving the use

spending operating, although exports, production, and business sentiment have been affected by the slowdown in overseas economies. the assessment of the underlying trend as a whole is unchanged from the previous outlook report released in april 2019, but the slowdown in overseas economies seems to be affecting not only exports and production, as has been seen to date, but also the business sentiment of some firms as well as manufacturers'machinery investment, among others. in the meantime, domestic demand, such as business fixed investment, has maintained its firmness, mainly in nonmanufacturing, and private consumption has been increasing moderately, albeit with fluctuations ; thus, the output gap has remained positive and the real gdp growth rate for the april - june quarter of 2019, which was released in august, was 1. 3 percent on an annualized quarter - on - quarter basis, registering a positive figure for the third consecutive quarter. looking at developments by major expenditure item, with corporate profits staying at relatively high levels on the whole, the uptrend in business fixed investment has been maintained, mainly in investment intended for domestic capacity expansion, that aiming at saving labor in order to deal with labor shortage, and that in research and development for growth areas. especially in nonmanufacturing, an increase has been observed in construction of logistics facilities, reflecting the expansion of e - commerce business, and of accommodation facilities to meet the demand of inbound visitors. meanwhile, according to the financial statements statistics of corporations by industry, quarterly, business fixed investment by manufacturing firms for the april - june quarter of 2019 was minus 6. 9 percent on a year - on - year basis, falling below the previous year's level for the first time in two years, due mainly to the effects of trade issues. private consumption has maintained its moderate increasing trend with labor market conditions remaining tight and the income situation continuing to improve, albeit with fluctuations resulting from weather conditions. exports have continued to show some weakness, mainly reflecting the effects of the slowdown in overseas economies. as a result of this situation, production mainly of export - related goods has exhibited some weak developments, but industrial production as a whole has been more or less flat. in these circumstances, business sentiment has been weakening somewhat, mainly in manufacturing. 2. baseline scenario of the outlook for economic activity japan's economy is likely to continue on an expanding trend throughout the projection period, which covers from fiscal 2019 through fiscal 2021. in fiscal 2019, exports are projected to continue showing some weakness