Basel Committee - Compendium of Documents

Compendium of documents produced by the
Basel Committee on Banking Supervision
May 2001

Preface

This document is a revised and updated version of the Compendium of Basel Committee documents that was first issued in April 1997.

Progressively over recent years, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which has thirteen member countries,1 has been actively expanding its links with supervisors in non-member countries with a view to strengthening prudential supervisory standards in all the major markets. These efforts have taken a number of different forms, including:

  • the development and dissemination throughout the world of policy papers on a wide range of supervisory matters;
  • the creation of a close network of worldwide supervisory authorities, who meet in an international conference every two years;
  • the pursuit of supervisory cooperation at local level through the creation of regional supervisory committees and active support for their activities;
  • the increasing provision of supervisory training both in Basel and at regional or local level.

As these contacts have developed, the pronouncements of the Basel Committee have become more and more influential as standards to which supervisory authorities, both in developed countries and in the emerging markets, aspire. Their credibility has been supported by the principle that all the material proposals are subject to a consultative process, in which the private sector and supervisory authorities, including those from the non-G10 countries, have an opportunity to provide input.

The international aspect of the work of the Basel Committee has been expressly noted by the G7 Heads of Government, initially at the Halifax Summit in 1995 and progressively at more recent G7 Summits. The Communiqué issued at the close of the 1996 Lyon Summit welcomed the work being done by the Basel Committee to develop supervisory cooperation and invited it to expand its efforts with regard to strengthening prudential supervision in the emerging markets. In this light two separate products were needed:

  • a comprehensive set of principles for effective banking supervision (the Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision);
  • a package of the existing Basel Committee recommendations, guidelines and standards in a reasonably compact form.

This Compendium of Basel Committee documents was compiled to meet the second of these initiatives. It is not a complete re-issue of all the Committee's past pronouncements, but a comprehensive set of statements concerning ongoing supervisory policy that have been issued over the years re-presented in a coherent framework. The documents are all "final" in the sense that no consultative papers are included, although some of them may be superseded by new texts in due course, in which case they would be removed. The first volume contains the documents relating to basic supervisory methods, the second to more advanced topics and the third to international issues. Some of the documents are quite dated, but the Committee has decided that they may still have relevance for countries in transition. In general, the texts have not been amended but some have been shortened to remove unnecessary repetition or overlap with other texts, and in one or two cases have been amalgamated into a single document. The Basel Capital Accord reproduced here is the 1988 version, adapted to reflect subsequent published amendments to the credit risk framework.

An index summarising the basic content of each document is provided in the following pages. The index closes with a list of the Committee documents that are omitted from the Compendium, for example obsolete texts and consultative proposals that have been superseded by final versions. These documents are still obtainable from the Committee's Secretariat at the Bank for International Settlements, Postfach, CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland. The Compendium is now issued in loose-leaf format, so as to be capable of regular up-dating. It is on the BIS Website on the Internet at http://www.bis.org and will shortly be available in CD-ROM format. Translations in French, German and Italian of the 1999 version of the Compendium are now available in hard copy and the 2000 version will also be translated in due course.

1Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States. Spain joined the group on 1 February 2001.

[ Preface ]
[ Volume I: Basic supervisory methods ]
[ Volume II: Advanced supervisory methods ]
[ Volume III: International supervisory issues ]
[ Committee documents not included in this Compendium ]