Washington, DC:
The Financial Stability Board (FSB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF)
today published a report to mark the completion of the second phase of the
G20 Data Gaps Initiative
(DGI-2). This report also lays out priorities for a new initiative
led by the IMF to address gaps relating to emerging policy needs.
The report finds that significant progress has been made in addressing data
gaps identified during the global financial crisis of 2007-08 through the
two phases of the Data Gaps Initiative, including in the development of
conceptual frameworks, and improvements in data coverage, timeliness, and
periodicity. Building on the close collaboration among the participating
economies and international organizations, the peer pressure mechanism, and
explicit support from the G20, policy makers now have a better
understanding of the risks and vulnerabilities their economies face. The
data improvements have helped them to develop effective policy responses
including, for example, to the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, despite the progress made during the initiative, challenges remain
for some participating economies in fully closing data gaps related to some
DGI-2 recommendations. In particular, challenges remain on: securities
financing transaction data, securities statistics, sectoral accounts,
international investment position, international banking statistics,
cross-border exposures of non-bank corporations, public sector debt
statistics, and commercial property price indices. Participating economies
and international organizations will continue to address these remaining
challenges. Implementation will be monitored, on an annual basis, as in
DGI-2, and the findings will be published on the
DGI webpage.
Building on the success of DGI-2, participating economies and international
organizations support further work to address data gaps relating to
emerging policy needs. The IMF staff, in close cooperation with the FSB and
the Inter-Agency Group on Economic and Financial Statistics, and in
consultation with participating economies, have developed a high-level
workplan for the new initiative. The workplan covers 14 recommendations
under four main statistical and data priorities: (i) climate change; (ii)
household distributional information; (iii) fintech and financial
inclusion; and (iv) access to private sources of data and administrative
data, and data sharing. It will be submitted to G20 Finance Ministers and
Central Bank Governors later this year and its recommendations are expected
to be implemented within five years after the launch.
Notes to editors
In October 2009, the FSB and IMF published
The Financial Crisis and Information Gaps, a report which responded to a request from the G20 Ministers and
Governors to explore information gaps and provide appropriate proposals for
strengthening data collection. The report, which set out a series of
recommendations to address identified data gaps, was endorsed by G20
Ministers and Governors and led to the first phase of work (DGI-1). In
September 2015, it was agreed that the DGI work should continue into a
second phase (DGI-2).
The main objective of DGI-2 was to implement the regular collection and
dissemination of reliable and timely statistics for policy use. DGI-2 also
included new recommendations to reflect evolving policymaker needs. Its 20
recommendations were clustered under three main headings: (i) monitoring
risk in the financial sector; (ii) vulnerabilities, interconnections and
spillovers; and (iii) data sharing and communication of official
statistics. DGI-2 maintained continuity with the DGI-1 recommendations
while setting more specific objectives for G20 economies to compile and
disseminate minimum common datasets for these recommendations.
The member agencies of the Inter-Agency Group on Economic and Financial
Statistics (IAG) are the Bank for International Settlements, European
Central Bank, Eurostat, IMF (Chair), Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development, the United Nations and the World Bank. The FSB
participates in the IAG meetings.
Press enquiries:
FSB: +41 61 280 8477, press@fsb.org
IMF: +1 202 623 4277, psherpa@IMF.org