It All Falls into Place

• Author: Adelheid Burgi-Schmelz and Alfredo M. Leone
• Position: Director and is Deputy Director in the IMF's Statistics Department.

Access to the right data is critical when analyzing economic trends and events. Without it, forecasting what direction the economy is likely to take in the future, or why past economic events played out the way they did, is a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle when some pieces are missing so the picture is incomplete. The Data Gaps Initiative will help bridge some of the gaps and improve the quality of data used by economists across the world.

This initiative, spearheaded by the Group of 20 (G20) advanced and emerging market economies, focuses on filling data gaps by enhancing data collections, including economic and financial sector data that are the IMF’s responsibility. In doing so, it helps shed light on the global economic and financial crisis, its driving forces, and the measures taken to address it.

The Data Gaps Initiative also catalyzes joint efforts among international agencies on a broad range of economic and financial statistics by leveraging the relative strengths of each member, and thereby eliminating many blind spots in the global statistical landscape. This strengthened cooperation and coordination across international institutions has already improved data sharing, raised efficiency by avoiding duplication of efforts, and reduced the reporting burden on countries.

Interlocking crisis response

After almost four years of work, plans to implement enhancements to existing data sets are in place, and implementation of some of the enhancements has already taken place in some G20 economies. (See “Data to the Rescue” and “Finding New Data,” F&D, March 2009 and September 2010, respectively.) Substantive work is under way in other areas, including sectoral accounts that account for households, financial and nonfinancial corporations, and government; securities statistics on international debt instruments, international equities, and domestic securities; and real estate prices. Work on systemically important financial institutions is now in the developmental phase.

Within just weeks of the Data Gap Initiative’s launch, the Inter-Agency Group on Economic and Financial Statistics (IAG) was established and launched the Principal Global Indicators website, www.principalglobalindicators.org. The webÂsite draws on data from the members of the IAG—the Bank for International Settlements, the European Central Bank, Eurostat, the IMF (which serves as chair), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations...