Press Release No. 13/251

Press Release: G-20 Officials Welcome Progress in implementing the G-20 Data Gaps Initiative

July 8, 2013

Senior officials from G-20 and Financial Stability Board (FSB) member countries and eight international financial institutions welcomed progress being made in implementing the G-20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI) and the growing policy interest in the DGI with new data enhancements helping to support the analysis of financial networks both domestically and across border, as well as the links between the financial and the real sector, at a conference held in Washington on June 25-26, 2013. The DGI aims at closing information gaps revealed by the global financial crisis and focuses on the implementation of 20 recommendations outlined in the report “The Financial Crisis and Information Gaps” endorsed by the G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in November 2009.

Opening the conference, Mr. Min Zhu, Deputy Managing Director of the IMF said: “The DGI is helping enhance data that are critical for macro-economic policy formulation and especially for monitoring global financial stability. For example, without sufficient data you cannot have meaningful forecast of debt sustainability.” The two-day conference was organized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Statistics Department and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) Secretariat in collaboration with the Inter-Agency Group on Economic and Financial Statistics (IAG).¹

Participants underlined the need to ensure that the data emerging from the DGI are of high quality, timely, consistent, and comparable among countries, and should be made available to policy makers. They also identified a number of key challenges including confidentiality concerns that limit broader data sharing, lack of source data, and adequate resources for statistics.

Closing the conference, Mr. Louis Marc Ducharme, Director, Statistics Department of the IMF, thanked the participants for their excellent feedback and underscored the need for continued progress in closing data gaps. “In implementing the DGI, participants will face the difficult challenge of ensuring the right balance between the quality and the timeliness of data,” he said.

The outcomes of the conference will be reflected in the fourth progress report to the G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors for their meeting in October 2013.

¹ The members of the IAG are the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the European Central Bank (ECB), Eurostat, the IMF (chair), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations, and the World Bank.