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Quarterly Update on the Special Data Dissemination Standard—First Quarter 2002 There was continued strong interest in information on the Fund's Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB), especially for emerging market economies. Despite delays in the dissemination of fiscal sector data by a few subscribers, the overall trend of more timely data dissemination was continued. Half of SDDS subscribers already disseminate the International Investment Position (IIP), and others are working toward their first data release, due at the end of the second quarter. Moreover, efforts to promote the importance of compiling external debt statistics continued. Finally, papers presented at the UNECE/Eurostat Work Session on statistical metadata highlighted work underway to develop a system for the DSBB that facilitates the easy and efficient exchange of data and metadata on the Internet. Observance Status At the end of the first quarter, 49 of 50 subscribers met the SDDS requirements for the coverage, periodicity, and timeliness of the data and for the dissemination of advance release calendars (Table 1).1 (A complete list of subscribers may be accessed on the Fund's DSBB at http://dsbb.imf.org/Applications/web/sddscountrylist/.) One SDDS subscriber—Iceland—was not in observance. Information on the status of this subscriber has been posted on the DSBB (see the What's New page). All 50 SDDS subscribers disclose data on international reserves and foreign currency liquidity in accordance with the SDDS reserves data template.

Monitoring

Monitoring of the data and access dimensions of the SDDS is carried out against the release dates stated in subscribers' advance release calendars and metadata. In the first quarter, there was a notable improvement in the timeliness of releases for monthly and quarterly data categories compared with the same quarter of 2001 (Table 2). However, compared with the previous quarter, there was a marginal decline in performance resulting primarily from slippages in the timely dissemination of data on central government operations and central government debt. An average of nine SDDS subscribers experienced delays in the dissemination of monthly central government operations data in the first quarter compared to six in the previous quarter, while four subscribers delayed the dissemination of central government debt data, compared to two in the previous quarter. These slippages resulted from a number of factors, including changes in accounting systems.

Table 2. Monitoring of Observance of the SDDS, January 2001-March 2002 Percentage of Monthly and Quarterly Data Disseminated on Time1 (Quarterly Averages)
Data Categories	Q1/01	Q4/01	Q1/ 02
Monthly and Quarterly Data	85.4	94.7	93.5
Monthly Data	85.8	93.9	92.5
Production index	86.8	91.2	93.5
Consumer prices	90.4	96.6	95.2
Producer prices	89.5	94.9	94.9
Central government operations	76.3	87.7	79.2
Analytical accounts of banking sector	82.9	93.0	91.5
Analytical accounts of central bank	82.6	93.2	93.2
Official reserves	87.1	95.9	95.3
Reserve template	91.4	98.0	97.3
Merchandise trade	85.5	94.5	92.5
Quarterly Data	84.9	95.5	94.5
National accounts	90.6	94.6	99.0
Employment	83.5	96.7	94.9
Unemployment	87.6	96.3	94.9
Wages and earnings	89.7	96.8	96.7
Central government debt	70.7	91.5	87.5
Balance of payments	87.6	95.5	93.9
1Number of data categories released on the day announced in the advance release calendar as a percentage of the total number of data categories to be released.

DSBB Usage

The results of an analysis of DSBB usage statistics for the first quarter showing, inter alia, the 10 most frequently accessed countries' metadata are presented in Table 3. The table shows that several emerging market economies are among the most frequently accessed countries on the DSBB.

Table 3: DSBB Usage Statistics—Number of Hits per Month
	Jan-02		Feb-02		Mar-02
Total General Pages		248,893		214,449		228,123
Total Country Pages		492,351		392,076		392,782
of which:
Top 10 countries including summary methodologies	Argentina	15,350	Argentina	10,863	Turkey	13,231
	Turkey	14,322	Turkey	10,480	Argentina	11,394
	Malaysia	12,431	Malaysia	9,935	Malaysia	11,127
	Hong Kong SAR, China	11,606	Mexico	9,892	Japan	10,454
	USA	11,555	Japan	9,512	USA	9,726
	Japan	11,397	USA	9,333	Hong Kong SAR, China	9,724
	Mexico	11,258	Hong Kong SAR, China	9,196	Italy	9,674
	United Kingdom	10,929	Italy	8,660	Mexico	9,456
	South Africa	10,624	United Kingdom	8,469	South Africa	9,040
	Poland	10,352	South Africa	8,411	Poland	8,461
Grand Total1		741,244		606,525		620,905
1Total monthly hits including GDDS; internal Fund access to DSBB sites is excluded.

External Debt and International Investment Position (IIP) Statistics

The Fund, with the assistance of other international agencies represented on the Inter-Agency Task Force on Finance Statistics (TFFS), completed the last of seven planned seminars on external debt statistics in February 2002. The most recent seminar was held in Bahrain in cooperation with the Bahrain Monetary Authority. The primary target audience for these seminars has been SDDS-subscribing countries, given their need to disseminate quarterly external debt statistics by end-September 2003. All SDDS-subscribing countries have been given the opportunity to participate in these seminars. As a result of the seminars, the Fund believes that there is an increased awareness of the importance of compiling external debt statistics, a better understanding of the SDDS data dissemination requirements for external debt and IIP statistics, and increased awareness of the need to plan ahead to improve the quality of these statistics.

While these seminars were aimed at managers and senior compilers and focused on the development of action plans to improve the external debt data, the training seminars to be conducted in fiscal year 2003—at the Joint Vienna Institute (May 6-17, 2002) and the Joint Africa Institute (October 28-November 11, 2002)—will be aimed at mid-level compilers and, with the needs of this audience in mind, will cover more comprehensively the methodology and practice of compiling external debt statistics.

Following the end of the SDDS transition period for the dissemination of annual IIP data in December 2001, Fund staff have been working with SDDS subscribers to ensure that the IIP is disseminated and metadata are posted on the DSBB no later than June 30, 2002. Twenty-five subscribers already meet the SDDS requirements for the IIP, and work on this data category is at varying levels of completion among the remaining subscribers.

DSBB Enhancements

In order to underscore efforts underway to upgrade the functionality and capabilities of the DSBB, Fund staff presented two papers at a joint UNECE/Eurostat Work Session on statistical metadata in Luxembourg during March 6-8, 2002. These papers described efforts to introduce a Relational Database Management System for metadata combined with the rendering of the DSBB metadata model (SDDS and GDDS) in Extensible Markup Language (XML) vocabularies and schemas. Once completed, these improvements will allow DSBB users to search for useful information, both across countries and data categories, and organize and display this information. One possibility would be to allow users to undertake data quality assessments by extracting information from the DSBB using the Fund's Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF).