This IFC Bulletin is the official periodical of the Irving Fisher Committee. The Bulletin contains articles and the text of papers presented within the framework of the ISI Conferences. This issue of the IFC Bulletin contains the proceedings of IFC the Conference on "Central Bank Issues Regarding National and Financial Accounts", Basel, September 2004
Financial accounts statistics are becoming increasingly important for monitoring the financial side of the economy and its links to the real side. Central banks are also relying on these data more and more as the rise of globalisation, cross-border ownership and financial innovation seem to have speeded up the transmission of policy and other effects. The usefulness of financial accounts statistics is also growing in the context of financial stability analysis allowing the deri vation of macro-prudential indicators taken from the financial balance sheets and the transaction accounts of the various non-financial sectors of an economy. The use of financial accounts sta tistics, however, is often limited due to the lack of a full and integrated set of timely and high frequency data. Therefore, the completion of a quarterly system of from-whom-to-whom financial accounts is seen as a major step to improve the understanding of the links between the sectors of an economy and the rest of the world. It also helps to disentangle the complexity of the financial system and its relationship to the real side of the economy.
This paper discusses key issues falling into three categories. They are linked to questions, which have to be addressed by moving to such a complex and detailed system of financial accounts. The issues are not representative, but they do reflect to some extent my own experi ence of constructing, compiling and using financial accounts. Chapter II deals with the first set of key issues, the design of financial accounts. Financial accounts are part of an integrated sys tem of accounts as described in the System of National Accounts (SNA93) or in its European counterpart, the European System of Accounts (ESA95). Data are usually provided in a non-consolidated form. This means that, for instance, corporate bonds issued by one corporation and held by another appear as both liabilities and financial assets in the balance sheet of the non-financial corporation sector. A more detailed presentation provides from-whom-to-whom financial accounts tracing the debtor/creditor relationships by sector and illustrating the links between stocks and flows for various financial instruments.
Chapter III elaborates on key issues falling into the compilation of financial accounts cate gory: Compilation relies on numerous statistical sources, usually collected originally for other purposes. They are of high frequency and timeliness when taken from statistics on money and banking, balance of payments, government finance, or securities issues. Advanced financial accounts systems are based on a rather broad set of data, including statistics from security by-security databases, corporate balance sheets or household surveys, if they are timely and detailed enough. Such a broad coverage of data with from-whom-to-whom statistical informa tion substantially reduces the need to apply the so-called counterpart-method for drawing up the sector accounts. Otherwise, it requires some work in assessing which data sets should be chosen within the compilation process.
Finally, Chapter IV looks into key issues related to how financial accounts are disseminated and used for economic and policy analyses in current practice, such as monetary policy analy sis, fiscal policy analysis, conjunctural analysis, and financial stability analysis