Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board |
Quarterly Update on the Special Data Dissemination
Standard—Second Quarter 2003 August 7, 2003 Fifth Review of the Fund's Data Standards Initiatives On July 9, 2003, the Executive Board of the IMF conducted its Fifth Review of the Fund's Data Standards Initiatives covering the SDDS, the GDDS, and the Data Quality Program (DQP). The main and supplementary papers as well as the Public Information Notice (PIN) "IMF Executive Board Reviews Data Standards Initiatives", which details the results of that discussion, have been posted on the Fund's external website and may be accessed by clicking here. Observance Status By the end of the second quarter 2003, 52 of 53 subscribers met the SDDS requirements for the coverage, periodicity, and timeliness of the data and for the dissemination of advance release calendars (Table 1). (A complete list of subscribers may be accessed on the IMF's Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB) at (http://dsbb.imf.org/Applications/web/sddscountrylist/.) Also, by early July, all subscribers disseminated a National Summary Data Page (NSDP) providing macroeconomic and financial data consistent with the metadata posted on the DSBB.1 External Debt Statistics The transition period for the new quarterly external debt data category expired on March 31, 2003; subscribers have until the end of September 2003 to disseminate data for the second quarter of this year. As of June 30, 2003, 16 subscribers--Argentina, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (China), Indonesia, the Republic of Lithuania, Norway, the Philippines, the Republic of Poland, the Slovak Republic, South Africa, Thailand, Tunisia, and Turkey--disseminate data for this new data category on their NSDPs. |
Monitoring Monitoring of the data and access dimensions of the SDDS is carried out against the release dates stated in subscribers' advance release calendars (ARCs) and metadata. In the second quarter, there was an overall decline in the on-time dissemination of releases for monthly and quarterly data categories compared with the same quarter of 2002 (Table 2). This occurred because some subscribers missed updating their National Summary Data Pages (NSDPs)--which are used for SDDS monitoring--on scheduled release dates. Compared with the previous quarter, there was a slight improvement in the timeliness of monthly data, but some slippage across quarterly data categories, notably for national accounts and balance of payments.
DSBB Enhancement Project Following the launch of the enhanced DSBB website (http://dsbb.imf.org/) on March 10, 2003, the Statistics Department initiated a DSBB Users Survey, which is available at (http://dsbb.imf.org/Applications/web/dsbbsurvey/) and is aimed at gathering information on users' reactions to the enhanced DSBB (Box 1). Preliminary results from the survey indicate that the DSBB has been more regularly accessed by users since the enhancements. More than two-thirds of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the information was easier to find and access to related sites improved. Among the new features, the ability to compare "key concepts" (detailed information on data categories by countries) was seen as the most valuable enhancement. Almost half of the respondents so far have been economists, with students, statisticians, and academics the most common categories among the remaining groups.
1India posted an NSDP (http://www.finmin.nic.in/stats_data/nsdp_sdds/index.html) that meets the SDDS requirements on July 7, 2003. |