Balance Sheet Approach (BSA)

Source details

Session No.: CT 25.15
Location: Shenzhen, China
Date: October 27-31, 2025 (1 week)
Delivery Method: In-person Training
Primary Language: English
Deadline passed
Qualifications: Participants are expected to have a degree in economics or statistics, or equivalent experience.

Officials at central banks, ministries of finance and other agencies responsible for:
- compiling monetary and financial statistics, government finance/debt statistics, and external sector statistics;
- the supervision and regulation of financial institutions;
- conducting financial stability or macro-financial analyses.

Presented by the Statistics Department (STA).
Purpose: provide participants with the necessary skills to compile and analyze the BSA matrix — a three-dimensional financial statistics.
STA has developed a BSA tool that combines the balance sheets of the main sectors of an economy into a single matrix to generate a sectoral distribution of claims and liabilities on a “from-whom-to-whom” basis.
Sectors combined in the BSA matrix:
- the financial sector,
- central government,
- nonfinancial corporate sector,
- household sector,
- the external sector.
The course guides officials through the process of generating a BSA matrix using financial, fiscal, and external sector statistics.
Analytical uses highlighted:
- understand overall balance sheet linkages;
- identify specific exposures and vulnerabilities such as:
- excessive reliance on external funding;
- leverage buildup in the corporate sector;
- overreliance on the banking sector for sovereign debt placement.

Upon completion of the course, participants should be able to:

Compile the BSA matrix using monetary, government, and external sector data.
Review and summarize the source data used for preparing the BSA matrix and identify critical data gaps for their respective countries.
Prepare work plans for addressing these data gaps over the medium-term, in order to provide national policy makers with an analytically useful BSA matrix.
Use the BSA matrix information for the identification of balance sheet imbalances, exposures, and risks to shocks such as sudden capital outflows or sharp exchange rate depreciation.